Pride and Prejudice

Overview

Three volumes, sixty-one short chapters, about 380 pages. Austen began it in 1796 as First Impressions, when she was twenty, and it was rejected unread; she revised and published it in 1813. It is her funniest book and her most tightly plotted, and the machinery is almost invisible on a first read.

The situation is economic before it is romantic. Mr Bennet has an estate worth two thousand a year and five daughters. The estate is entailed on the male line, so when he dies it passes to his cousin Mr Collins and the women are left with a fraction of it. There is no profession any of them can enter. Marriage is not a hope, it is the only available career, and Mrs Bennet’s vulgarity is at bottom an accurate assessment of the danger.

Against that, Austen writes a comedy in which the heroine refuses two proposals, one of them from the richest man she will ever meet.

What happens

Bingley, amiable and rich, rents Netherfield and is immediately taken with Jane Bennet, the eldest and prettiest. His friend Darcy, richer and colder, declines to dance with Elizabeth and is overheard calling her tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me. She makes a joke of it and a judgement of him.

Two men complicate the first volume. Mr Collins, the clergyman who will inherit Longbourn, arrives to choose a wife among the daughters, proposes to Elizabeth in a speech of magnificent self-regard, is refused, and marries her friend Charlotte Lucas within days. And Wickham, a charming officer, tells Elizabeth that Darcy cheated him out of a living. She believes him entirely, which is what her dislike of Darcy has prepared her to do.

Bingley leaves for London and Jane is quietly heartbroken. In volume two Elizabeth visits Charlotte, now installed near Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and Darcy proposes: a proposal that spends as much time on the degradation of the connection as on his feelings. She refuses him with real anger, accusing him of ruining Jane’s happiness and of injuring Wickham. The next day he hands her a letter. He admits separating Bingley and Jane, explains why, and sets out what Wickham actually did, which includes an attempted elopement with Darcy’s fifteen-year-old sister. Elizabeth reads it twice and the ground moves.

Volume three takes her to Pemberley, Darcy’s estate, where the housekeeper describes a master nobody who knows him socially would recognise, and where Darcy himself appears unannounced and is courteous to the relations he had sneered at. Then Lydia, the youngest Bennet, runs off with Wickham unmarried, which in 1813 ruins not only her but all her sisters. Darcy finds them, pays Wickham’s debts and buys the marriage, and tells nobody. Elizabeth learns of it by accident. Lady Catherine arrives to forbid an engagement that has not happened, Elizabeth refuses to promise, and the refusal is what tells Darcy he may ask again.

How to read it

Read the first sentence as a joke with a victim. It is not Austen’s opinion; it is the opinion of Meryton, and the rest of the chapter shows a mother acting on it. The book will do this constantly, handing you a sentence that seems to be the narrator’s and turns out to be a character’s. That is free indirect style, and learning to hear the quotation marks that are not there is most of what reading Austen well consists of.

Keep the money in view. When you meet a sum, translate it into stakes rather than modern currency: Bingley’s four or five thousand a year makes him the most eligible man in the county; Mrs Bennet’s daughters will have forty pounds a year each; Wickham’s debts are the price at which he can be bought. Shapard’s annotated edition does this for you if you want it done.

Notice that Elizabeth changes her mind because of evidence, in a particular order: the letter, then the housekeeper, then his conduct over Lydia. She does not soften; she is corrected. The novel is arranged so that you make the same mistakes she does, which is why the letter in chapter 35 rereads so differently the second time through.

Read Charlotte Lucas as seriously as Elizabeth does not. Her marriage is the book’s control experiment, and Austen gives her a clear-eyed defence.

The common misreading is that this is a novel about a proud man and a prejudiced woman. Both faults belong to both of them, and Austen never assigns the title.

Questions it raises

• Elizabeth’s judgement of Darcy is wrong, and her judgement of Collins, Wickham and her own mother is right. What makes the difference?
• Does the novel endorse Charlotte’s marriage, condemn it, or refuse the question?
• Darcy fixes the Lydia disaster with money and secrecy. Is the happy ending bought, and does Austen want us to notice?
• If marriage is the only career available, can any of these women’s choices be free in the way the novel’s comedy implies?
• Austen was writing during the Napoleonic wars, and the regiment at Meryton is in the book. Why does she keep the war offstage?
• Elizabeth says she first knew herself on reading the letter. Is self-knowledge in this novel something you reason your way to, or something evidence forces on you?