Pride and Prejudice

#novel #England #19century
Key Terms (tags)

 

GENRE novel
TIME PERIOD 19th century
THE MODERN WORLD
LITERARY FORM
HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

 

 

Place on List:

II. Literary Genre: The Novel

1. What is the novel?

Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. (1813, England)

Supporting References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice

2. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/pride/

3. Birch, Dinah. "Pride and Prejudice." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 26 Aug. 2013 .

Pride and Prejudice. A novel by Jane *Austen, published 1813. Originally a youthful work entitled ‘First Impressions’, it was refused by Cadell, a London publisher, in 1797. Austen's most popular novel, and one which has had a series of successful adaptations in film and television, it demonstrates her skill at revealing character through incident and incident through character as she portrays the series of mutual misunderstandings between her clever quick‐witted heroine Elizabeth Bennet and the condescending Mr Darcy.

“Mr and Mrs Bennet live with their five daughters at Longbourn in Hertfordshire. In the absence of a male heir, the property is due to pass by entail to a cousin, William Collins. Through the patronage of the haughty Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Collins has been presented with a living near Rosings, the Kentish seat of Lady Catherine. Charles Bingley, a rich young bachelor, takes Netherfield, a house near Longbourn, bringing with him his two sisters and his friend Fitzwilliam Darcy, nephew of Lady Catherine. Bingley and Jane, the eldest of the Bennet girls, very soon fall in love. Darcy, though attracted to the next sister, the lively and spirited Elizabeth, offends her by his supercilious behaviour at a ball. This dislike is increased by the account given her by George Wickham, a dashing young militia officer (and son of the late steward of the Darcy property), of the unjust treatment he has met with at Darcy's hands. The aversion is intensified when Darcy and Bingley's two sisters, disgusted with the vulgarity of Mrs Bennet and her two youngest daughters, effectively separate Bingley from Jane.

“Meanwhile the fatuous Mr Collins, urged to marry by Lady Catherine (for whom he shows the most grovelling respect), and thinking to remedy the hardship caused to the Bennet girls by the entail, proposes to Elizabeth. When firmly rejected he promptly transfers his affections to Charlotte Lucas, a friend of Elizabeth's, who accepts him. Staying with the newly married couple in their parsonage, Elizabeth again encounters Darcy, who is visiting Lady Catherine. Captivated by her in spite of himself, Darcy proposes to her in terms which reveal the violence the proposal does to his self‐esteem. Elizabeth indignantly rejects him, on the grounds of his overweening pride, the part he has played in separating Jane from Bingley, and his alleged treatment of Wickham. Mortified, Darcy writes to justify the separation of his friend and Jane, and makes it clear that Wickham is, in fact, an unprincipled adventurer.

“On an expedition to the north of England with her uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs Gardiner, Elizabeth visits Pemberley, Darcy's seat in Derbyshire, believing Darcy to be absent. However, Darcy appears, welcomes the visitors, and introduces them to his sister. His manner, though still grave, is now gentle and attentive. At this point news reaches Elizabeth that her youngest sister Lydia has eloped with Wickham. With considerable help from Darcy, the fugitives are traced, their marriage is arranged, and (again through Darcy) they are provided for. Bingley and Jane are reunited and become engaged. In spite of the insolent intervention of Lady Catherine, Darcy and Elizabeth also become engaged. The story ends with their marriages, an indication of their subsequent happiness, and an eventual reconciliation with Lady Catherine.

“Though a novel of manners, Pride and Prejudice, to borrow the words of Ronald *Blythe, extracts more drama out of petty social rivalries and class differences than ‘most other writers can get from shipwreck, battle, murder, or mayhem’. Jane Austen regarded Elizabeth Bennet as her favourite among all her heroines.”

4. Birch, Dinah. "Austen, Jane." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 15 Aug. 2013.

http://www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780192806871.001.0001/acref-9780192806871-e-434

The article offers an overview of Austen and less a discussion on the above-cited text.

“(1775–1817) Novelist, born in the rectory at Steventon, Hampshire, the sixth child in a family of seven. Her father, the Revd George Austen, was a cultivated man, comfortably prosperous, who taught Jane and encouraged her both in her reading and her writing. She was briefly tutored by a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton, and attended the Abbey House School, Reading (1785–6). As a child and young woman she read widely, including, among novelists, Henry *Fielding, Lawrence *Sterne, Samuel *Richardson, and Fanny *Burney; and among poets, Sir Walter *Scott, William *Cowper, and, her particular favourite, George *Crabbe. Her life is notable for its lack of events; she did not marry, although she had several suitors, one of whom she accepted one evening, only to withdraw her approval the following morning. She lived in the midst of a lively and affectionate family, with occasional visits to Bath, London, Lyme, and her brothers' houses. Any references there may have been to private intimacies or griefs were excised from Jane's letters by her sister Cassandra after the author's death, but the correspondence retains flashes of sharp wit and occasional coarseness that have startled some of her admirers. The letters cover the period 1796–1817, and her correspondents include Cassandra, her friend Martha Lloyd, and her nieces and nephews, to whom she confided her views on the novel (to Anna Austen, 9 September 1814: ‘3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on’; to J. Edward Austen, 16 December 1816: ‘the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’). In 1801, the family moved to Bath; in 1806, after Mr Austen's death, to Southampton; and in 1809 to Chawton, again in Hampshire; for a few weeks before her death Jane lodged in Winchester, where she died of Addison's disease. The novels were written between the activities of family life, and the last three (Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion) are known to have been written in the busy family parlour at Chawton.

“Her juvenilia, written in her early and mid‐teens, are already incisive and elegantly expressed; Love and Freindship (sic) was written when she was 14, A History of England (‘by a partial, ignorant and prejudiced historian’) at 15; at 16 A Collection of Letters; and sometime during those same years, Lesley Castle. Lady Susan is also an early work, written probably in 1793–4. Of the major novels, Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, Emma in 1816, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion posthumously in 1818. They were, however, begun or completed in a different order. The youthful sketch Elinor and Marianne (1795–6) was followed in 1797 by First Impressions, which was refused without reading by the publisher Cadell; the former was rewritten in 1797–8 as Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey followed in 1798–9 and was, in 1803, sold to the publishers Crosby and Sons who paid the author £10 but did not publish. In 1809 Sense and Sensibility was again revised for publication, and First Impressions was recreated and renamed Pride and Prejudice.

“Between the writing of Northanger Abbey and the revision of Sense and Sensibility she wrote an unfinished novel, The *Watsons, probably begun in 1804 and abandoned in 1805 on her father's death—an event which may account for her comparatively long silence at this period. Mansfield Park was begun at Chawton in 1811, Emma in 1814, Persuasion in 1815; and in 1817, the year of her death, the unfinished Sanditon. It is likely that although Northanger Abbey was, together with Persuasion, the last of the novels to be published, it was the earliest of the completed works as we now have them.

“The novels were generally well received from publication onwards; the prince regent (whose librarian urged Austen to write ‘an historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august house of Coburg’) kept a set of novels in each of his residences, and Scott praised her work in the Quarterly Review in 1815; he later wrote of ‘that exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting’. There were, however, dissentient voices; Charlotte *Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett *Browning found her limited. Nonetheless, after the publication of J. E. Austen Leigh's Memoir in 1870 a Jane Austen cult began to develop. Since then her reputation has remained consistently high, though with interesting shifts of emphasis. D. W. Harding's ‘Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen’ (Scrutiny, 1940) presents her as a satirist more astringent than delicate and Marilyn Butler's Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) situates the writer's work, so often seen as literary escapism, in its social and political context. See B. C. Southam (ed.), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (1968). The standard text of the novels, 6 vols (1923–54), is by R. W. Chapman, who also edited the letters (new edn 1995 by D. Le Faye). There are biographies by Claire *Tomalin and David Nokes, both 1997.”