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Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

Summary

It's hard to believe that Jane Austen wrote the sophisticated and acerbic PRIDE AND PREJUDICE when she was only 21 years old, in 1797. Originally entitled FIRST IMPRESSIONS, the novel was rejected, revised, retitled, and finally published-anonymously-in 1813, only four years before Austen's untimely death. In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Austen calls on her sharp observations of vanity, venality, pomposity, and downright nuttiness in a story about a respectable but far from wealthy family full of daughters-girls who desperately need to find husbands if they are to have any kind of economic security. The eldest of the Bennett family, Elizabeth, is a bright, opinionated, and complacent young woman whose reaction to an offer of marriage from her wealthy but impossibly arrogant suitor, Fitzwilliam Darcy, is revulsion. But in the course of the story both Elizabeth and Darcy learn important lessons about their own folly and blindness, and about the dangers of superficial judgements. As the two perform their elaborate courtship dance, Austen surrounds them with some of her most uproariously clueless characters-from the wacky Mrs. Bennett to the wonderfully unctuous Mr. Collins, another of Elizabeth's admirers. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is, of course, a highly satisfying and offbeat love story, but it is also an unparalleled examination of human nature at both its best and its hilarious worst.

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Media Reviews

"Arrange the great English novelists as one will, it does not seem possible to bring them out in any order where she is not the first, or second or third, whoever her companions may be....A little aloof, a little inscrutable and mysterious, she will always remain, but serene and beautiful also because of her greatness as an artist."    -- Virginia Woolf

   -- Times Literary Supplement

"Five charming sisters on the gayest, merriest manhunt that ever snared a bewildered bachelor! Girls! Take a lesson from these husband hunters!"    -- MGM promotion of the 1940 film of the novel

"Women, we gather, are seldom artists, because they have a passion for detail which conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work. We would cite Sappho and Jane Austen as examples of two great women who combine exquisite detail with a supreme sense of artistic proportion."    -- Virginia Woolf

"The work [i.e. 'Pride and Prejudice'] is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, on anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style."    -- Jane Austen

"She thought an unattached young woman with intelligence...was the most marvelous creature in the world...What must have made this type so appealing to her, of course, was that this was the only time in their lives in which women like that had an absolute power-if only the power to withhold themselves-over the desires of a man. Austen felt keenly the fragility of the circumstance...This is what makes the scene of Darcy's first proposal so potent: Elizabeth will never experience again so fine an emotional surge as she does when she spurns him. It is the one context in which she is permitted to say exactly what she feels."    -- Louis Menand

   -- New York Review of Books

"This writer of marriage stories...had a mind as interesting as any novelist who has ever lived. In Jane Austen, the mating game assumes dimensions that Boccaccio ignored-the joining of understanding and temperament, property and taste, as well as body and body. If marriage had become the central rite of the new materialist society of Austen's England, it was also the central trial of an individual's worth, which...became the test of his or her ability to perceive and to know."    -- David Denby

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Bantam Classic & Loveswept
Published date: 1981
Size: 4.25 x 7 inches
Weight: 0.35 pounds

Synopses

In early nineteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the suit of a snobbish gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements of her four sisters. Includes explanatory notes throughout the text, an introduction discussing the author and the background of the story, and a study guide.

Publisher's Notes

For over 150 years, Pride And Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen herself called this brilliant work her "own darling child." Pride And Prejudice, the story of Mrs. Bennets attempts to marry off her five daughters is one of the best-loved and most enduring classics in English literature. Excitement fizzes through the Bennet household at Longbourn in Hertfordshire when young, eligible Mr. Charles Bingley rents the fine house nearby. He may have sisters, but he also has male friends, and one of these -- the haughty, and even wealthier, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy -- irks the vivacious Elizabeth Bennet, the second of the Bennet girls. She annoys him. Which is how we know they must one day marry. The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and Darcy is a splendid rendition of civilized sparring. As the characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, Jane Austen's radiantly caustic wit and keen observation sparkle.

Other Editions

• Paperback Reprint - Simon & Schuster (1985) - from $1.00
• Hardcover Illustrated - Readers Digest Assn (1984) - from $1.00

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