Pride and Prejudice

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Pride and Prejudice opens with one of the most debated sentences in English literary history: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Jane Austen wrote those words as a young woman of twenty or twenty-one, and the novel she built around them has since sold over twenty million copies. American Book Review ranks that opening line second on their list of the top one hundred greatest opening lines in English literature, behind only Moby Dick's "Call me Ishmael."

  The book was not always called Pride and Prejudice. Austen first titled it First Impressions and completed a draft between October 1796 and August 1797. Her father sent a letter to London bookseller Thomas Cadell on the 1st of November 1797, offering him the manuscript. Cadell declined by return post. The story sat in a drawer for well over a decade before it finally reached print.

  When it did appear, on the 28th of January 1813, it was published anonymously, as all of Austen's novels were. The title page credited the work to "the Author of Sense and Sensibility" rather than to any name. Yet within a century, the memorable characters and themes had inspired dramatic adaptations, reprints, unofficial sequels, films, and television versions reaching mass audiences. How a rejected manuscript became one of the most beloved novels in the English language is a story about money, family obligation, the law of inheritance, and two people who misread each other almost completely.

• 2. From First Impressions to Print

  ›

  Austen began writing the novel after a stay at Goodnestone Park in Kent with her brother Edward and his wife in 1796. The draft she produced, still called First Impressions, was a complete work by August 1797. After Cadell's rejection, Austen left it substantially untouched for years.

  Between 1811 and 1812 she returned to revise the manuscript significantly. Around that same time she chose the new title, most likely drawing on the final chapter of Fanny Burney's 1782 novel Cecilia, where the phrase "pride and prejudice" appears three times in block capitals in a passage about "sufferings and oppositions." Austen is known to have admired Burney's work. The phrase itself had also appeared in writing by Joseph Hall, Jeremy Taylor, Joseph Addison, and Samuel Johnson across the preceding two centuries, but the Cecilia echo is considered the strongest candidate for its source.

  Austen sold the copyright to Thomas Egerton of the Military Library in Whitehall for £110, having originally asked for £150. It was a transaction she would come to regret. She had published Sense and Sensibility on a commission basis, meaning she kept the profits after costs. Unaware that Sense and Sensibility would sell out its edition and earn her £140, she handed Egerton full ownership of Pride and Prejudice for a single flat payment. Jan Fergus later calculated that Egerton made around £450 from just the first two editions of the book.

  The first edition ran to three hardcover volumes and was advertised in The Morning Chronicle at 18 shillings. Favourable reviews arrived promptly. Three such reviews appeared in the first months following publication, and the first edition sold out. A second edition followed in October 1813, and a third appeared in 1817. Foreign translations came quickly too: French in 1813, followed by German, Danish, and Swedish. The novel reached the United States in August 1832 under the title Elizabeth Bennet or, Pride and Prejudice. R. W. Chapman's scholarly edition, first published in 1923, became the standard text on which most modern versions are based. It was also the name change from First Impressions that protected the novel from confusion with two other works already published under that title: a novel by Margaret Holford and a comedy by Horace Smith.

• 3. The World the Bennets Inhabit

  ›

  The Bennet family lives at Longbourn, an estate near the small town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, England. The novel is set in the early nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic Wars, and the background hum of military life shapes the story from its earliest pages. A regiment of militia is encamped outside Meryton; the Brighton camp for which the regiment eventually departs had opened in August 1793, and Austen uses these military movements to place events in the novel between 1793 and 1795.

  Mr Bennet draws an income of £2,000 a year from Longbourn, a figure that marks him as a landed gentleman of modest means. Mr Darcy, by contrast, is said to be worth at least £10,000 a year. Mr Bingley is introduced as a man with an income of £4,000 a year, and his inherited fortune of £100,000 derives from trade rather than from land. Wealth in this society is not merely comfortable; it is the primary lens through which every male character of marrying age is first described.

  The counties where the action unfolds carry their own social distinctions. Hertfordshire attracted socially aspiring men from London, like Bingley, at a moderate degree of wealth. Kent, where Lady Catherine de Bourgh holds Rosings Park, was favoured by prosperous City of London families who bought estates to establish themselves as gentlemen, and the style of living there is described as beyond the social range of the Hertfordshire characters. Derbyshire, where Darcy's estate of Pemberley stands, is another matter entirely: the same families have held land there for generations, untouched by the buying and selling common in Kent and Hertfordshire.

• 4. Entail, Settlement, and the Marriage Market

  ›

  Charlotte Lucas accepts Mr Collins's proposal not out of sentiment but from acute awareness that, as one of a large family at age twenty-seven, she cannot afford to wait for something better. Her calculation sits at the heart of what drives nearly every relationship in the novel.

  The legal architecture underpinning these pressures is intricate. Longbourn is entailed by strict settlement to the male line, meaning that on Mr Bennet's death it must pass to his nearest male heir, the distant cousin Mr Collins, regardless of how many daughters Mr Bennet has. Mrs Bennet brought £5,000 into the marriage as her separate estate, and later inherited a further £4,000 on her father's death. But the family faces living only on interest from those sums once Mr Bennet dies. To his regret, he also failed to save from the Longbourn income to build up marriage portions for his daughters.

  The institution of separate estate was designed precisely to protect women in this situation. Under the Common Law doctrine of coverture, a married woman had severely constricted independent legal rights; any property she brought to the marriage became her husband's outright. To guard against this, dowry sums were placed with trustees before the wedding, generating income for pin money during the marriage and jointure for the widow afterward. Amy Erickson found that in more than ten percent of marriages recorded in probate accounts for men of all classes, some form of marriage settlement sum was referenced. For families with any degree of property, dowries for daughters were expected to run to £500 and above.

  Georgiana Darcy carries a settled dowry of £30,000 from the Pemberley estate. Caroline Bingley holds an inheritance of £20,000 in her own right. Even Lydia Bennet, after her disgrace, receives a separate estate of £1,000 settled on her by Mr Darcy at her wedding to Wickham. These figures are not romantic decoration; they are the operating terms of a legal system that determines who can marry whom and on what basis. Mrs Bennet rails at the unfairness of the Longbourn entail without realising, though her older daughters do, that it was only through that entail that she and Mr Bennet could have married as young as they did.

• 5. Class and Who Counts as a Gentleman

  ›

  When Darcy proposes to Elizabeth for the first time, he frames his love as something that has had to overcome their economic and social differences. Elizabeth's reply cuts through that framing: she insists that she and Darcy, as a gentleman's daughter and a gentleman, are equals. Lady Catherine later phrases the same gap in starker terms, asking whether "the shades of Pemberley" will be polluted by such a match.

  The key class distinction operating throughout the novel is between those who are gentlemen and those who are not. The primary marker is inherited landed wealth. Pemberley, Rosings Park, and Longbourn are all inherited estates of long standing; their families carry settled gentlemanly status. Lucas Lodge is not an estate of that kind, and Sir William Lucas and his family accordingly do not. Gentlemanly standing could, however, be maintained without land in specific occupations: the Church, the Law, and the Armed Forces. Within the military itself, officers in regular regiments of foot were gentlemen; officers in the Marines were not.

  The Bingley family presents a navigation problem. Caroline Bingley and Mrs Hurst speak and behave as though they have always belonged in the upper levels of society, but Austen makes clear that the Bingley fortune comes from trade. Bingley rents Netherfield Hall rather than owning it, which distinguishes him sharply from Darcy, whose estate has been in his family for generations and who is, through his mother, the grandson and nephew of an earl. The old Anglo-Norman layer of the upper class surfaces in the names themselves: Fitzwilliam, D'Arcy, de Bourgh, and even Bennet are traditional Norman surnames.

  Darcy eventually accepts Elizabeth's charge that his behaviour toward her and her family had been, from the start, not gentlemanlike. His own words, quoted in the novel, acknowledge it: "Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: 'Had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.'" Both Darcy and Elizabeth come to see true gentlemanly qualities as grounded in concern for others' feelings rather than in the display of hereditary rank. Kitson Clark argues that in reaching this conclusion, Austen anticipates the shifting ideals of gentlemanly conduct that would later underpin Victorian social and educational ethics.

• 6. Letters and the Life of the Page

  ›

  Around forty letters are quoted or referred to across the novel, a density that has led commentators to propose, without concrete textual evidence, that First Impressions may originally have been drafted as an epistolary novel, written entirely in letter form as Austen's novella Lady Susan had been.

  Darcy's letter to Elizabeth following his first, disastrous proposal is the pivot on which the entire story turns. Through it, Elizabeth and the reader learn that George Wickham, the son of Darcy's father's steward, had refused the parish living Darcy's father intended for him, taken a cash payment instead, squandered it, and then attempted to elope with Darcy's fifteen-year-old sister Georgiana for her considerable dowry. The letter reveals Wickham as a fraud and forces Elizabeth to re-examine her own prejudice. She is described as re-reading and re-examining the letter so many times that the re-readings become a substitute dialogue with Darcy through which her feelings for him shift and change. As one reading of the novel puts it, knowing the letter "by heart" primes Elizabeth to seriously contemplate knowing his heart.

  Letters in this social world carry a particular physical weight. In an age when physical contact between unmarried persons of opposite sex is heavily constrained by convention, a letter handled repeatedly by its sender and then by its recipient could function as a token of that person's physical presence. Austen describes the physical details of letters in the novel with care: their envelopes, whether they have inserted sheets or are written on the envelope sheet itself, the size and quality of the handwriting.

  The novel also exploits the gap between what characters know from private letters and what they can express in polite conversation. Aunt Gardiner writes to Elizabeth after seeing her and Darcy together in Derbyshire: "Will you be angry with me, my dear Lizzy, if I take this opportunity of saying (what I was never bold enough to say before) how much I like him?" That private license to speculate eventually provides the mechanism by which the plot resolves, as the carefully worded letters between Elizabeth and Aunt Gardiner clear the final obstacles standing between Darcy's renewed proposal and its acceptance.

• 7. What Elizabeth and Darcy Learn

  ›

  In chapter 36, Elizabeth meditates on her own failures with a self-reproach that is unusual in the novel's world: "How despicably have I acted! I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable distrust. How humiliating is this discovery! yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly... Till this moment I never knew myself."

  Other characters are not given the space for that kind of development. Mrs Bennet is described in the novel as a woman whose "business of her life was to get her daughters married: its solace was visiting and news." Tony Tanner writes that she has a very limited view of her performance and is incapable of appreciating the feelings of others, being aware only of material objects. Her behaviour mirrors the society she inhabits: her daughters' survival depends on marriage, and she knows no other way to pursue it.

  Darcy's arc mirrors Elizabeth's. Where she has to confront her prejudice, he has to confront his pride and his ungentlemanlike condescension. The American novelist Anna Quindlen observed in an introduction to an edition of Austen's novel in 1995 that Pride and Prejudice is about the search for self, and that it is the first great novel to teach readers that this search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room, making small talk, as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery.

  The narrative technique that makes this inner life legible is free indirect speech: narration that adopts the tone and vocabulary of a particular character without using explicit dialogue. By filtering events through Elizabeth's viewpoint, Austen invites the reader to share her prejudices and misapprehensions, then to feel the particular discomfort of recognising those mistakes from inside her perspective. One reading of the novel notes that "the learning curve, while undergone by both protagonists, is disclosed to us solely through Elizabeth's point of view." Kitty Bennet, a smaller case study in the same theme, is said in the novel to improve greatly once removed from Lydia's influence and placed in her older sisters' superior society, suggesting that the capacity for growth is not limited to the two central characters.