Jane Austen's classic tale of love overcoming preconceptions centers on the two eldest daughters of the Bennet family: Jane and Elizabeth. Elizabeth has to fend off an unwelcome offer of marriage from the Rev. Collins, while mistakenly falling for the charms of the dashing Mr. Wickham, before realizing that appearances are deceptive and that her prejudice against Mr. Darcy has blinded her to his real character.

Set in South Carolina during the summer of 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lilys fierce-hearted zstand-in mother,y Rosaleen, insults three racists in town, they escape to Tiburon, South Carolinaa town that holds the secret to her mothers past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily finds refuge in...

Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and, the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.