Showing results for title "Pride and Prejudice", by author "Jane Austen" in Literary History & Criticism

Pride and Prejudice has delighted generations of readers with its unforgettable cast of characters, carefully choreographed plot, and a hugely entertaining view of the world and its absurdities. With the arrival of eligible young men in their neighbourhood, the lives of Mr and Mrs Bennet and their five daughters are turned inside out and upside down.

Pride and Prejudice is the most famous of Jane Austen’s novels, and its opening is one of the most famous lines in English literature - “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Its manuscript was first written between 1796 and 1797, and was initially called First Impressions, but was never published under that title. Following revisions it was published on 28 January 1813 by the same Mr. Egerton of the Military Library, Whitehall, who had brought out Sense and Sensibility. Like both its predecessor and ...

Pride and Prejudice is set in rural England at the turn of the 19th century, and it follows the Bennet family, which includes five very different sisters. The eldest, Jane, is sweet-tempered and modest. She is her sister Elizabeth’s confidant and friend. Elizabeth, the heroine of the novel, is intelligent and high-spirited. She shares her father’s distaste for the conventional views of society as to the importance of wealth and rank. The third daughter, Mary, is plain, bookish, and pompous, while Lydia and Kitty, the two youngest, are flighty and immature.