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Pride and Prejudice
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By Jane Austen, review by Bruce Meyer
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Pride and Prejudice
By Jane Austen, review by Bruce Meyer
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*Talk about this book in our forums.
Before you read the book:
Jane Austen lived in a world that was disappearing around her as she wrote about it. Pride and Prejudice chronicles a world that seems far removed from the realities of its age. The novel was published in 1813, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, when revolutionary fervor and Romanticism gripped Europe. Austen’s novel features none of this. A number of commentators have pointed out that the world of polite drawing room conversation, motive-ridden innuendo, and wit was an anachronism even in Austen’s time. For all its backward glances to an age of social refinement, grace and station, Pride and Prejudice gives us an important insight into a world that is far from trivial, a world that is desperately in search of certainty.
Austen’s manuscript was originally titled “First Impressions,” but when another, less successful novel of that title appeared eight years before the publication of Pride and Prejudice, Austen changed the name of the work. Whatever title, the assertion that Austen continually examines throughout the novel is the question of how one forms opinions about other people, and how those opinions shape the direction of one’s life. With a nod to the skepticism of the eighteenth century English philosopher, David Hume, Austen asks her characters and her readers to trust neither initial impressions nor what the imagination does with those assumptions.
About the author
Jane Austen was born at Steventon in Hampshire in 1775, the daughter of a clergyman. She lived a quiet, genteel life that some biographers and critics have described as “uneventful.” She experienced some heights of style during her years in Bath, England, and many quiet, though physically draining, years when she lived as a partial invalid in Chawton and Winchester where she eventually died and was buried in 1817. During her short life, she accomplished a considerable literary output, creating some of the most memorable novels of the early nineteenth century, from the Gothic parody Northanger Abbey to Mansfield Park, Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. In recent years, her novels have made for stunning costume drama-films that have been enjoyed all over the world.
At the root of Pride and Prejudice is the question of marriage. Suppose you are a young woman, coming into maturity during the early nineteenth century. What rights had you as an individual? As we learned from Jane Eyre, our first book club pick, to be a woman during this period was to be dependent either on the kindness of strangers (to borrow a phrase from Tennessee William’s Blanche Dubois) or on one’s own wits. Marriage determined one’s station in society, the course of one’s life, and the future of one’s happiness – and we must remember that the notion of happiness was essentially an invention of the preceding century. Marriage presented a woman with several options. A woman could marry for wealth or station. She could enter matrimony in pursuit of an imaginary ideal. The best of all possible outcomes was, and still is, to find one’s true companion spirit and to fill the relationship with satisfaction, love and the security and certainty that comes from having it all.
As you read the book:
Pride and Prejudice opens with the somewhat famous statement about the nature of marriage and relationships in Austen’s age: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” As the Bennet sisters explore the various possibilities for matrimony that society presents them, pay close attention to the way Austen uses the themes of choice and opinion and the migration of views from one perception to a totally new perception.
Pride is a form of blindness, though Austen does not use it in the traditional tragic, hubristic sense. Instead, pride is that which stands in the way of one’s perceptions and understanding of others, that which creates prejudice, or the judgment one passes, at times too rashly, on others. The question is, will the resolved ending that is so popular in Shakespeare’s comedies about relationships, find suitable resolution in the world of polite masks and private aspirations that Austen depicts in Pride and Prejudice?
As you read the book, try to chart the migration of sentiment (that wonderful Eighteenth century term for feeling) as characters outgrow their first impressions. Watch, also, how Austen continually defines and redefines the various notions of ideal relationships and the purpose of marriages. Ask yourself if marriage is a constraint on the Bennet sisters or a means of liberation and fulfillment for them. Beneath all the machinations of plot and opinions, see if you can determine Austen’s own view of marriage. After all, one contemporary novelist who knew Austen, Mary Russell Mitford described Jane Austen as “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly.” Cruel, perhaps, but somehow not without some credence for the author who observed and recorded so much about the propriety and decorum of the mating game.
Read Pride and Prejudice online
To learn more about Pride and Prejudice or to read the complete text, visit these links:
This is an annotated hypertext on-line version of the text of ,i>Pride and Prejudice, along with other works by Austen. The top 10 songs about Austen are also amusing.
http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janeinfo.html
Another version of the text, in a chapter by chapter format, can be found at
http://www.austen.com/pride/vol1ch01.htm
This url will take you to the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England, a museum and archive dedicated to her works.
http://www.janeausten.co.uk/
The British government has gotten into Jane Austen with this site dedicated to her homes, her works and even her final resting place in Winchester Cathedral.
http://www.hants.gov.uk/austen/
This site, dedicated to her literary home, Chawton, features a great deal of material on her life, her environment, and the place where she worked.
http://www.jane-austens-house-museum.org.uk/
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