Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice

Introduction

Few readers have been able to resist Jane Austen's remarkable second published novel. Pride and Prejudice bring an utterly charming, headstrong heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, and a hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy, who is undervalued and misunderstood until the novel's impassioned climax, when reader and heroine alike change their estimation of his true worth. The novel also claims one of the most memorable supporting casts in fiction, including the ultimate parental embarrassment, the marriage-hungry Mrs. Bennet, the oily, toadying Mr. Collins, and the fire-breathing social dragon Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whom Elizabeth slays in one of the funniest, most satisfying confrontations in the literature, as well as an ingenious courtship plot that combines psychologically, social, and poignant drama. Jane Austen herself referred to the novel as "my own darling child" and thought Elizabeth "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least I do not know." The novelist need not have worried, since most readers have shared the author's pleasure in her heroine, short listing her as one of fiction's strongest female presences, while valuing Pride and Prejudice as Austen's masterpiece and one of the wittiest romantic comedies of manners ever written.

Pride and Prejudice is not just an admirably crafted, satisfying story, but one of the crucial books in the history of the novel. In it, Jane Austen helped reclaim the novel as an instrument for truth and a serious criticism of life. The future of the novel as written by William Thackeray, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope can be glimpsed in Jane Austen's masterpiece, derived from her conscious restriction to what she knew best. As she indicated, "three or four families in a country village are the very thing to work on".

Discussion

Pride and Prejudice stands as one of the most popular novels of all time. Other novels may be more artistically complex, describe a greater range of human experience, or more subtly illuminate the human heart, but for sheer delight and human warmth, few works can compete with Jane Austen's most popular novel. Pride and Prejudice eschews powerful and dramatic effects, yet as a classically restrained small-r romance, it continues to thrill and engage. Other Austen heroines do, of course, find their soul mates, but Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy stand in select company with pairings such as Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester and Romeo and Juliet, forming the quintessential love stories of English literature. Elizabeth is not a neglected stepdaughter, but there is a deeply satisfying Cinderella-like sweep to her romance.

Elizabeth Bennet perhaps exemplifies the woman that many females would like to be, and the one many eminent men would like to marry. Generations of readers have validated Austen's own characterization of Elizabeth as being "as delightful a character as ever appeared in print" (Austen, 1995, 201). Intelligent and sensitive, attractive (but not defining herself through her beauty), responsible and discerning, loving to those who deserve her love, she ...