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Pride And Prejudice

Pride And Prejudice: the Basics

Jane Austen's best-loved novel was first published in 1813. It tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet's troubled courtship with the initially arrogant but ultimately sympathetic Mr Darcy. The author herself worried that the book was a little too light and frothy, but its painstaking observations of the habits and preoccupations of polite Regency society has never lost its appeal.

Pride and Prejudice silhouette
While by no means the first woman novelist, Austen nevertheless broke new ground by her insistence on social realism and psychological depth. Her characters are not the shipwrecked mariners and criminal rogues of the 18th-century novel, and her settings are not the blasted landscapes and haunted castles of the Gothic novel, a genre she found ridiculous. Instead, we meet convincing, three-dimensional people engaged in recognisable activities such as taking water-cures for their gout, or plotting to marry off their daughters to eligible young men.


Pride And Prejudice has been the subject of numerous TV and film adaptations (as well as a Broadway stage musical of 1959), reflecting its continuing hold on readers' affections. In 2003, it was runner-up in the BBC's Big Read poll to find the nation's favourite book.