Pride and Prejudice

About this edition

Introduction

Pride and Prejudice opens with a sentence that has done more for its author’s reputation than most novels manage in their entirety: a single man with a fortune, we are told, must be in want of a wife. It is delivered as a universal truth, and the whole book then spends its length demonstrating how little the people who believe it understand about each other.

The plot is a courtship plot, and it is worth saying plainly that it is a good one: five sisters, an entailed estate, a militia regiment posted nearby, and two introductions that go badly wrong. But the machinery is not really what keeps readers returning. What Austen does, with a consistency no English novelist had managed before her, is make the quality of a person’s judgement the thing at stake. Elizabeth Bennet is not tested by a wicked rival or a shipwreck; she is tested by her own confidence that she can read people, and she fails. Darcy is tested by his certainty that his position entitles him to decide for others, and he fails too. Their slow correction is the novel.

That correction is comic rather than tragic, which is why the book survives re-reading. Austen’s irony is not decoration; it is the instrument by which the reader is invited to notice what the characters cannot. We are told, in the famous first line, something absurd, and we are trusted to hear it as absurd. Almost every misjudgement in the novel is delivered in the same way: in a voice so reasonable that agreeing with it is the trap.

There is also a harder edge that the adaptations tend to soften. The marriage market is not a metaphor here. Charlotte Lucas’s decision, Wickham’s career, Lydia’s fate and the brutal economics of the entail are all consequences of a world in which a woman with no fortune has very few moves available to her, and where a single misstep is permanent. The wit is real, and so is the exposure beneath it.

This edition gives the complete text, unaltered, in sixty-one chapters. The notes gloss the period vocabulary that has drifted since 1813; the reading guide is for anyone who wants to argue with the book rather than simply enjoy it.

The author

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon in Hampshire, the seventh child of a clergyman, and died on 18 July 1817 at Winchester, aged forty-one. She lived almost her whole life within a small circle of family and neighbouring gentry in Hampshire, Bath and Kent, and she wrote about the society she could observe at close range rather than the wars and empires that were reshaping the world around it.

Four novels appeared in her lifetime, all anonymously: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together after her death, in 1817, with a biographical notice by her brother Henry that first named her as the author. The books were reviewed respectfully and sold modestly; the collected edition that would have consolidated her reputation did not appear in her lifetime.

Her letters, of which a substantial number survive, show the same habits of mind as the novels: quick, dry, unsentimental about money, and considerably more caustic about her neighbours than a reader of the fiction might expect. The twentieth century made her a canonical figure, and the two centuries since have produced a vast apparatus of criticism, sequels, films and adaptations; the books themselves have needed none of it to stay readable.

Publication history

The novel began as a manuscript called First Impressions, written in 1796 and 1797, when Austen was in her early twenties. Her father offered it to a publisher in 1797 and it was declined by return of post — a rejection that survives in the correspondence and is the earliest documented refusal of a novel that would eventually sell in enormous numbers.

The manuscript was substantially revised over the following years, most heavily around 1811 and 1812, and by the time it was accepted it had a new title. Pride and Prejudice was published on 28 January 1813 in three volumes by Thomas Egerton of Whitehall, with the author described only as “the author of Sense and Sensibility”. Austen had sold the copyright outright for £110 rather than publishing on commission, a decision that cost her a great deal of money once the book began to sell.

A second edition followed in the same year, and a third in 1817. By the end of the nineteenth century the novel was a staple of the English novel’s self-image; by the end of the twentieth it was the subject of a global adaptation industry. The text reproduced here follows the first-edition text as transcribed for Standard Ebooks, and not a word has been changed.

Notes

A short glossary of the period vocabulary that carries most of the weight in the novel, and that a modern reader is most likely to pass over.

• Entail — a legal arrangement that fixes the line of inheritance to male heirs, preventing the current owner from selling or bequeathing the estate freely. The Bennet estate is entailed on a male cousin, which is why Mrs Bennet’s anxiety about her daughters’ marriages is not merely comic.
• Living — a parish benefice; the right to appoint its clergyman was property, and could be given away as patronage. Darcy’s power over Wickham’s career comes from this.
• Chaise and four — a light carriage drawn by four horses; the number of horses was itself a public statement of income.
• Michaelmas — 29 September, one of the quarter days on which rents, leases and hiring agreements fell due. When a house is “let at Michaelmas”, the calendar itself is doing social work.
• Assembly — a public ball, open to the local gentry and officers by subscription; the room at Meryton is where reputations are made in an evening.
• Accomplishments — the skills a young woman of the gentry was expected to display: drawing, singing, modern languages, dancing, and some claim to “a certain something” in her air. Caroline Bingley’s list is a social weapon, not a syllabus.
• Pin money — an allowance settled on a wife for her personal expenditure, distinct from the jointure that would support her as a widow.
• Jointure — the provision made for a widow out of her husband’s estate. Its size determines how much of a woman’s future is settled by her marriage.
• Settlement — the legal instrument drawn up before a marriage, allocating property between the families. Much of the novel’s tension is about who gets to draft it.
• Coming out — a young woman’s formal entry into society, after which she could be introduced at assemblies and dances. Lydia’s “out” at fifteen is a scandal in itself.

Reading guide

Six questions for a first or a fifth reading. None of them has a settled answer.

1. The first sentence of the novel states as a “universal truth” something that the book then spends its length complicating. Where else does Austen hand the reader a confident generalisation and quietly let it fail?
2. Elizabeth’s turning point is usually placed at Darcy’s letter. Is the letter convincing as a cure for prejudice, or does Austen simply need her to change?
3. Charlotte Lucas makes a choice the novel neither condemns nor endorses. What does the book’s treatment of her say about how far it is willing to follow its own economic argument?
4. Darcy’s first proposal is a speech about his own suffering. His second is a speech about hers. Is that a moral improvement, or only a change of tactics?
5. Wickham is charming, plausible and entirely self-interested. Why does the novel give him so much of its best dialogue before exposing him?
6. The book ends with three marriages. Which of them does the text actually approve of, and how would we know?