Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by the English author Jane Austen, first published on 28 January 1813 by Thomas Egerton of London. Austen began writing it in 1796 under the working title First Impressions, completed the first draft in the summer of 1797, and later revised it before publication. It was her third completed novel and the second to appear in print, following Sense and Sensibility. The novel is set in the English countryside of Hertfordshire and Kent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it follows the Bennet family: Mr and Mrs Bennet and their five daughters, Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia. Because the family estate is entailed to a distant male cousin, Mr Collins, Mrs Bennet is determined to see her daughters married well. When the wealthy bachelor Charles Bingley moves to Netherfield Park, he forms an attachment to Jane, while his friend Mr Darcy offends Elizabeth by his proud and reserved manner. Elizabeth, quick-witted and outspoken, takes an instant prejudice against him, encouraged by the handsome officer Wickham, who slanders Darcy. Darcy's first proposal is angrily rejected. Over time Elizabeth discovers his true character, including his part in separating Bingley and Jane and his quiet efforts to save the family when Lydia elopes with Wickham. A visit to Darcy's estate, Pemberley, changes her feelings completely. Darcy and Elizabeth both learn to overcome their pride and prejudice, and the novel ends with their marriage alongside the reunion of Jane and Bingley.

The novel explores marriage as a social and economic institution, moral growth, and the dangers of judging by first impressions. It insists that marrying for money or status alone is wrong, yet marrying without any regard for material security is equally foolish; true affection and compatibility must be the foundation. Through Elizabeth, Austen shows a woman navigating a society in which marriage is almost the only respectable future. Sharp irony, lively dialogue, and free indirect discourse allow the reader to see both the characters' inner worlds and their self-deceptions. Austen wrote against the fashionable sentimental and Gothic novels of her day, grounding her fiction in ordinary domestic life and social observation. Though the book received only a few reviews on publication, it went on to become one of the most beloved novels in English, selling over twenty million copies, inspiring about twenty adaptations, and establishing the enduring enemies-to-lovers tradition. Its bicentenary in 2013 was celebrated across Britain, and it remains a touchstone of English literature.

About the Author

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, England, where her father was the rector of the local Church of England parish. She was the seventh of eight children, six boys and two girls, and was especially close to her elder sister Cassandra. The household also included boarding pupils her father took in to supplement his clerical income, as well as a small farm. At the age of six, Jane and Cassandra were sent away to school, first in Oxford, then in Southampton, but both girls became ill when a putrid fever broke out in the town, and they were brought home. From 1785 to 1786 they attended the Abbey House School in Reading. Jane's formal education was brief, but she grew up in a house full of books and family reading aloud, and she began writing as a teenager. Between 1787 and 1809 she produced a large body of juvenile sketches and early fiction that sharpened her satirical eye.

Austen never married. Her adult life was divided among Steventon, Bath, Southampton and Chawton, with a modest domestic routine that left time for writing. Her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, appeared in 1811, followed by Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1815. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1818, and she left an unfinished novel now known as Sanditon. All her works first appeared anonymously; in her lifetime they brought her little public fame.

She died on 18 July 1817 in Winchester, at the age of forty-one, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870, the first full biography of the author, which remained the standard source for half a century and helped transform her reputation. Since then Austen's novels have never been out of print. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a vast body of criticism, literary anthologies, film and television adaptations, beginning with the 1940 film Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier, established her as one of the most celebrated English novelists. Her acute irony, psychological depth and unflinching treatment of ordinary people in everyday life continue to influence writers and readers around the world.