Spectator competition winners: Charles Dickens pours scorn on Pride & Prejudice

In Competition No. 3323 you were invited to submit an extract from a book review written by a well-known author which trashes a work by another well-known author that is generally deemed to be a classic.

Virginia Woolf took a dim view of Ulysses. In a 1922 diary entry, she wrote: ‘I finished Ulysses and think it a misfire… The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious.’ Graham Greene was no fan either, judging it to be ‘a big bore… really one of the most overrated classics’. Then there is H.L. Mencken’s characteristically pithy verdict on The Great Gatsby: ‘A glorified anecdote.’ And, more recently, Geoff Dyer’s withering dismissal of Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending: ‘It isn’t terrible, it is just so… average…’

In a smallish entry, an honourable mention goes to David Shields’s Wodehouse skewering Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Now had he said “Great Aunt is watching you”, it would have been quite another matter.’ And to Richard Spencer’s Shakespeare on The Catcher in the Rye: ‘This tale, told by a phoney, full of noise, is “Hamlet-Lite”, its lies a wanton boy’s.’

The winners below net £30.

Embarking upon Miss Austen’s comedic novel Pride and Prejudice with a natural appetite for a hearty guffaw, the reader finds himself utterly confounded. He shudders at its parsonical title, the provincial Meryton setting. He finds no instance of exaggerated physiognomy or eccentric nomenclature to tickle his ribs, the numerous, marriageable Bennet girls with whom Miss Austen principally concerns herself remaining indistinguishable as caged parakeets. Such men as the copious plot provides are weak, oleaginous or haughty, though never so much so as to inspire a belly laugh. Is there compensating drama, pathos, sentimentality? Alas, no. No, Miss Austen’s protagonists do not act their parts, instead merely inhabiting them as if they were not in an entertainment at all.