Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Summary
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, and the arrival of one at Netherfield throws the Bennet household, five daughters and no son, into campaign mode. The amiable Mr Bingley and gentle Jane Bennet fall in love on schedule. The obstacle is the second daughter, Elizabeth, and Bingley's friend Darcy, who slights her at a ball within earshot and spends the rest of the novel paying for it. Their war of wit runs through a first proposal so insulting that Elizabeth refuses it in fury, a letter that dismantles everything she thought she knew, particularly about the charming officer Wickham, and a crisis when Wickham elopes with the youngest Bennet sister and Darcy quietly buys the family out of ruin without telling her.
If you have only seen adaptations, the surprise is the prose: fast, dry and precision engineered, with a narrator whose irony flickers through every sentence. Elizabeth Bennet is the most companionable heroine in English fiction, and the novel's real subject, how intelligent people misread each other and what it costs to find out, has not dated by a day. It is also simply the best constructed comedy in the language's novel tradition.
Austen drafted it as First Impressions in her early twenties; a publisher declined it unread in 1797. Revised years later, it appeared anonymously in January 1813, and she sold the copyright outright for 110 pounds, ten short of what she had asked.
Historical Context & Significance
It was fashionable from the first season, and the compliments came from useful quarters: Anne Isabella Milbanke, the future Lady Byron, called it the fashionable novel of the moment, and the critic George Henry Lewes later declared he would rather have written Pride and Prejudice than the whole of Walter Scott. The anonymous title page, By the Author of Sense and Sensibility, kept Austen's name out of print through her lifetime.
Selling the copyright for 110 pounds proved one of publishing history's great bargains for the buyer. The novel has since sold over twenty million copies, and its afterlife is an industry: the 1995 BBC serial and the 2005 film are only the largest items in a catalogue of sequels, retellings and transplants that shows no sign of slowing. Its opening sentence may be the most quoted in English fiction.