All Things Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is a great book, there's even people who think it may be greater than the bible, but it has one major drawback when it comes to making a splash with the younger generations - it's old; there ain't that many people today who would want to read about people in funny clothes that don't have either movies or TV, let alone the Internet. Even watching a movie about such ancient history may seem like a rather daunting proposition to some.

And yet the themes of Pride and Prejudice are immortal, which basically means they're recurring. After all, while our technology may have advanced in leaps and bounds since early 19th century, the human nature has essentially remained unchanged and thus the spirit of Jane Austen's masterpiece continues to live in modern literature and unavoidably in film. And if you've been around over the past couple of decades you must have crossed paths with it.
One example of this spirit rearing its beautiful head is Bridget Jones' Diary, the book and the movie. Some people even go as far as to argue that Bridgett Jones reads as a modernized adaptation of P&P. Yes Bridget Jones is no Elizabeth Bennet, but then modern emancipated fems are a far cry from the corseted fine ladies of the early 19th century. Perhaps had Elizabeth Bennet been born a couple of centuries later she'd have ended up being another Bridget Jones. There are also a slew of other things that don't exactly match, however a few characters in BJ seem to be pretty closely based off their counterparts in P&P.
Take Mark Darcy for example; first, in BJ the guy the main character falls for is played by the same actor that plays Darcy in BBC's 1995 P&P adaptation, Colin Firth, second, both characters share the same last name, sure the first name is different in BJ, but what can you do, different times call for different names, and third but not least, the character of Mark Darcy himself is in many ways the same as the P&P Darcy. And I don't think it's just all down to Colin Firth, after all there's the BJ book in which nobody plays him.
It doesn't stop with Mark Darcy though, there's Hue Grant's character. This one clearly alludes to Wickham from P&P, the story of the relationship between BJ and Hue Grant in BJ closely matches that of the relationship between Elizabeth and W in P&P and both characters share a host of similar traits; treacherous lying bastards both of them.
Finally there's the plot; the first impressions are negative, then the heroine falls for Hue Grant (who badmouths Darcy so our heroine begins to hate him even more), but in the end our heroine and Darcy end up together.
So to sum it up, if you've got a friend who's not keen at all on the good old days of horse drawn carriages, dependent women and no Internet, but you're still eager to introduce them to the wonderful(ly complex) world of human relationships as originally depicted by Jane Austen, you might wanna try to get them to watch/read BJD first. Give it a shot.