Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) is a paradigmatic Jane Austen story: the hero and heroine, Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, though destined for each other by Fate (or by character, which in Austen amounts to the same thing) are parted after just enough storyline to have developed a mutual interest. The rest of the story is then accounted for by their journey towards the realisation that they do, in fact, love each other, and by the overcoming of obstacles that their surroundings, their families, and their own actions throw in their way. Put so baldly it sounds unpromising, yet Austen manages to make of this rather hackneyed theme a gem of a novel: her plot construction, her masterly unfolding of the consequences of character, and the sparkling observation and wit with which she decorates her text, make it an unfailing source of pleasure, no matter how often read.

Having started in 1811 with the title “Sense and Sensibility”, Jane showed her modernity by repeating a winning formula, and published her second novel (which had originally been called “First Impressions”) as “Pride and Prejudice”. The name seems to derive from a passage near the end of Fanny Burney's novel Cecilia:

The whole of this unfortunate business … has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE … Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you also owe their termination.”

Sir Walter Scott said of this book:

In Pride and Prejudice the author presents us with a family of young women, bred up under a foolish and vulgar mother, and a father whose good abilities lay hid under such a load of indolence and insensibility, that he had become contented to make the fooibles and follies of his wife and daughters the subject of dry and humorous sarcasm, rather than of admonition, or restraint. This is one of the portraits from ordinary life which shews our author's talents in a very strong point of view. A friend of ours, whom the author never saw or heard of, was at once recognised by his own family as the original of Mr. Bennet, and we do not know if he has yet got rid of the nickname. A Mr. Collins, too, a formal, conceited yet servile young sprig of divinity, is drawn with the same force and precision … The author's knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognise, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.

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