Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
(1813)

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners and arguably the most popular of Jane Austen's works. The book revolves around Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia Bennet with Elizabeth as the central character. With no brothers and the family estate entailed to their closest male relative, the sisters are required to marry well in order to gain a livelihood. As in all of Austen's novels, individual conflicts are defined and resolved within a rigidly delimited social context, in which relationships are determined by wealth and rank. In a witty and satirical portrait of the men and women attempting to gain a livelihood, Austen highlights the faults in the system, raising questions about the value of manners, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of the British Regency.

Themes and Relevant Quotes

Attitudes to Love	Pride and Wealth	Propriety	Gender
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." "If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him." "Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance." "Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her" "... cautioning her in a whisper not to be a simpleton and allow her fancy for Wickham make her appear unpleasant in the eyes of a man of ten times his consequence" "Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications." "I'm not romantic you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home" "nothing but love, flirtation, and officers, have been in her head"	"Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us." "The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence, or frightened by his high and imposing manners, and sees him only as he chuses to be seen" "you wit and vivacity I think must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect that her rank will inevitably excite"	"It seems to me to shew an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country town indifference to decorum." "To Elizabeth it appeared that her family had made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening" "This situation of your mother's family, though objectionably, was nothing in comparison to the want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed by herself, by your three younger sisters, and occasionally even by your father." "Assistance is impossible; condolence, insufferable. Let them triumph over us at a distance, and be satisfied." [Elizabeth cannot marry Darcy...] "Because honour, decorum, prudence, nay, interest, forbid it."	"they are all silly and ignorant like other girls" "A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment." "Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. It gives her something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction among her companions."

Critical Responses

• "Elizabeth's sense and conduct are of a superior order to those of the common heroines of novels." - Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (Brian C. Southam) 
• "Written in a period of political crisis and social mobility, they [Austen's novels] are strategic critical analyses of the moral values and modes of behaviour through which a section of the ruling class was redefining itself." - Introduction to Penguin Classics Ed. Pride and Prejudice (Tony Tanner)