Jane Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice, then entitled First Impressions, when she was in her early twenties but it was rejected by a publisher and only finally appeared, in a much revised form and under a new title, in 1813. 

The book focuses on the Bennet family of mother, father and five nubile daughters, thrown into confusion by the arrival of two rich and unattached young men in the neighbourhood. Charles Bingley leases Netherfield, a house close to the Bennet residence and stays there together with his friend Fitzwilliam Darcy. During visits exchanged between the two houses, Bingley falls in love with the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane, while Darcy and Elizabeth, the second eldest, circle one another warily. Witty, clever and ironic, Elizabeth is intrigued by Darcy but dislikes his apparent coldness and arrogance and is prejudiced against him by stories she hears from others. At different times throughout the novel, misunderstandings, social snobbery and self-will conspire to keep both Jane and Bingley and Darcy and Elizabeth apart. But true love finally triumphs. A supporting cast of characters, often richly comic, orbits the central figures of Darcy and Elizabeth. The ill-matched relationship between the ironic, detached Mr Bennet and his gushing, silly wife is beautifully observed. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a splendidly self-satisfied and snobbish representative of everything that is bad about the aristocracy. Mr Collins, the clergyman and toady to Lady Catherine, unwittingly reveals himself in his true colours during the memorable scene in which he proposes marriage to Elizabeth.

Pride and Prejudice has long been Jane Austen’s most popular novel and, with its clear-eyed portrait of the ways in which society’s conventions dictate the shifting patterns of the relationships between the men and women in it, it is one of the greatest comedies of social manners in English literature.

Film versions: Pride and Prejudice (starring Greer Garson as Elizabeth and Laurence Olivier as Darcy,1940); Pride and Prejudice (Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, Colin Firth as Darcy, 1995, TV); Pride and Prejudice (Keira Knightley as Elizabeth, Mathew Macfadyen as Darcy, 2005)

Read on
Sense and Sensibility
>> Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters; Alison Lurie, Only Children; Emma Tennant, Pemberley (a sequel, published in 1993); Joanna Trollope, Other People’s Children; Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice
on First Reading Jane Austen