Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen began the book that became Pride and Prejudice in October 1796, when she was twenty, and finished a first version, called First Impressions, the following August. Her father offered it to the London publisher Thomas Cadell in November 1797; Cadell declined to look at it. She put the manuscript aside, revised it heavily in 1811–12, sold the copyright to Thomas Egerton for £110, and saw it published in three volumes on 28 January 1813, “by the Author of Sense and Sensibility”. Her name did not appear on any of her novels in her lifetime.

The plot is easily told and has been retold endlessly: a family of five daughters, an entailed estate, two eligible men arriving in the neighbourhood, and a second daughter quick enough to misjudge one of them and honest enough, eventually, to say so. What keeps the book alive is not the plot but the sentences. Austen had learned from Johnson and from the eighteenth-century comic novel, and she writes a prose of exact balance — the famous opening line is a joke built entirely out of the rhythm of a general truth — and then breaks it, again and again, with free indirect speech that lets us hear Elizabeth Bennet think without being told that she is thinking. The technique was not new with her, but nobody had used it so consistently or so lightly, and the modern novel of consciousness descends from it.

Read it also for its economy. There is no description of the countryside that does not tell us who is looking at it; there is no dinner party that does not move the story. Mr Collins’s letter, Lady Catherine’s visit, the long letter from Darcy at the centre of the book: each is a set piece that is also a hinge. Austen called the book “rather too light, and bright, and sparkling” in a letter to her sister in February 1813 and proposed, not seriously, that it wanted “a long chapter of sense”. Readers have declined the offer for two hundred years.

This edition follows the text of the Project Gutenberg transcription. Austen’s spelling and punctuation are preserved, including the long paragraphs of reported speech, with nothing changed in the author’s words. Chapter numbering is continuous, as in most modern editions, rather than restarting with each of the three original volumes.