jane austen book review

Pride and Prejudice

By jane austen.

'Pride and Prejudice', the widely read novel of Jane Austen begins with a practical saying about the marriage of that time, introducing one of the major themes of the novel.

Article written by Mizpah Albert

M.A. in English Literature and a Ph.D. in English Language Teaching.

From the day it found its place in print till now, it has been a more appealing novel to teenagers and to all the lovers of literature who loves romance. Pride and Prejudice is a character-driven narrative focuses on Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of the novel.

The novel is set in the late 18 th century , thus, one could see a lot of possibilities and consideration of marriage. Despite, love and marriage being the prominent themes in the novel, there is no violence or physical attraction in the story at all. Even during Lydia’s elopement, the readers were left to infer their attachment or living as husband and wife, with no hint to their attraction or attachments. Also, Lydia’s marriage with Wickham despite the family knowing his true nature is another constraint of the time Austen lived.

On the whole, the story focuses on romance, misconceptions, family relationships, and the problem with first impressions and gossip . This classically written romantic novel is see-through to the upper-class Victorian life.

Gender Roles and Marriage

Pride and Prejudice , in general, is Austen’s critical view on society and traditional stereotypical gender roles that portrayed women as objects of beauty with no rights. When men had financial independence, women had to depend on their male companions. In fact, middle- and upper-class women had few avenues open to them for a secure future.

If unmarried, they would remain dependent upon their relatives, living with or receiving a small income from their fathers, brothers, or other relations who could afford to support them. That is the reason we see why Mrs. Bennet insists on Elizabeth getting married to Mr. Collins, and getting her daughter well married for the better future of her daughters.

The marriage between Mr. Collins and Charlotte, Lydia and Wickham, portrays negative models of marriage. These marriages happen solely on the basis of a long-established understanding of gender roles and the desire to meet pragmatic social needs. When Lydia runs away it is made clear that only marriage can save her reputation and her family. Evidently, these marriages fall short of an ideal marriage. On the contrary, the marriage between Elizabeth and Darcy depicts independence, understanding, equality, and respect, suggesting a model for an ideal marriage.

In early nineteenth-century Britain, women did not have the privilege of higher education but they were educated through private tutors, governesses, and private schools. In addition, a young woman like Elizabeth Bennet had independence further her education through reading. As Elizabeth indicates to Lady Catherine, “such of us as wished to learn, never wanted the means. We were always encouraged to read and had all the masters that were necessary. Those who chose to be idle certainly might.” Also while talking about women of accomplishment Darcy comments that a really commendable woman will improve “her mind by extensive reading.”

A Realistic Novel

Pride and Prejudice is a realistic novel on many levels. Jane Austen fills her novels with ordinary people, places, and events. By contrast, and from the beginning, her readers saw that Jane Austen was doing something new with the novel, that she was using it to describe probable reality and the kinds of people one felt one already knew.

The novel has several references to financial advantages through marriage, a common aspect of 18 th century domestic lifestyle.  Money seems to be the prime object in the game of marriage. For example, Charlotte Lucas views marriage pragmatically and is quite willing to marry a fool, Mr. Collins, for the financial security and status he offers. Mrs. Bennet, though a rapturous woman in the novel, is practical and panicked over the reality of her daughter’s future, for they have no dowries or inheritances to count on. Lydia makes a fool of herself by running away with a man without money and spoils her reputation.

Wickham too is unwilling to marry her because she has no possibility of bringing financial advantages to his life through marriage. Fortunately, Darcy works out a plan and makes it financially advantageous for Wickham.

All’s well that Ends well

Pride and Prejudice ends with the happy union of Darcy and Elizabeth, Jane and Bingley , as it is expected at the very beginning of the novel. Elizabeth and Darcy go to live at Pemberley, while Jane and Bingley move to an estate nearby.

The final chapter of the novel focuses more on the impact of their marriage than their personal emotions. It also specifies how marriage impacts Kitty and Georgiana by giving them, positive role models. Also, Miss Bingley and Lady de Burgh gradually come to accept the marriage, compared to their initial despise over the possible union.  

Evidently, the novel enlightens the readers on how marriage affects not just the individual partners, but the assorted family and society around them. On contrary to the concept of marriage during Austen’s time, the novel ends with the note that a good marriage is where both partners love and respect each other. Positively, it can have positive ripple effects on many people around them.

Pride and Prejudice Book Review: Jane Austen’s Classical Romance

Book Title: Pride and Prejudice

Book Description: 'Pride and Prejudice' is a novel of all the time. It has captivated the hearts of readers across ages. The interesting plot captures the reader’s attention from the very first line. As it is narrated through the perspective of Elizabeth Bennet, the readers will get the feel of living alongside the Bennet family. As Elizabeth undergoes a change in perspective and character, readers get a picture of the other characters present in the novel and the time of the novel. One could understand the novel well in the very first reading. Though young readers of the present may find it difficult to understand the plot in a certain part, yet, close reading and a background of knowledge of Austen’s time will help one understand the novel better and enjoy.

Book Author: Jane Austen

Book Edition: Oxford World's Classics

Book Format: Paperback

Publisher - Organization: Oxford University Press

Date published: January 28, 1813

ISBN: 978-0-19-283223-3

Number Of Pages: 512

• Writing Style
• Last Impact on the Reader

Pride and Prejudice Book Review

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of all the time. It has captivated the hearts of readers across ages. The interesting plot captures the reader’s attention from the very first line. As it is narrated through the perspective of Elizabeth Bennet, the readers will get the feel of living alongside the Bennet family. As Elizabeth undergoes a change in perspective and character, readers get a picture of the other characters present in the novel and the time of the novel.

One could understand the novel well in the very first reading. Though young readers of the present may find it difficult to understand the plot in a certain part, yet, close reading and a background knowledge of Austen’s time will help one understand the novel better and enjoy.

• Incredibly simple plot  
• Realistic and relatable characters
• Actual projection of 18th-century upper-class life
• Unique writing style
• Elaborately described passages
• Free use of indirect speeches
• Plain, monotonous language

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About Mizpah Albert

Mizpah Albert is an experienced educator and literature analyst. Building on years of teaching experience in India, she has contributed to the literary world with published analysis articles and evocative poems.

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6 best Jane Austen books: From ‘Sense and Sensibility’ to ‘Emma’

Whether you’re just starting out with the classic british author or are a long-term indulger, here are some of her most readable , article bookmarked.

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Ranking Jane Austen’s six witty, wise, and utterly moreish novels changes over the years. You might have found Northanger Abbey absolutely unreadable when at school, but were rendered helpless with laughter when you picked it up again years later.

Pride and Prejudice 's first line reads as clearly in French as it does in English. Sympathies for Persuasion 's Anne Elliot grow along with life experience.

The acidic humour and social observation in Austen’s work is often glossed over in favour of the romance, but the two are absolutely key to her books’ ongoing popularity. Her heroines are not meek and mild (viz Daphne “milksop” Bridgerton) but flawed and fired up by their knowledge that as women, they need to marry well to secure a future for themselves and, in some cases, their wider family.

Read more: Best historical fiction books to read if you loved ‘Bridgerton’

Lizzie Bennett might be a fan favourite for her wit and “fine eyes”, but her pride also contributes to her sister’s near-downfall. Catherine Morland’s cheerful character is nearly sabotaged by her lack of life experience, and naïve belief that life must be like the gothic novels she so adores.

If you’ve never read one of Jane Austen’s novels, you may as well throw a dart and pick one at random. They are all superb in their own ways. Now that they have been continuously in print for more than 200 years, it’s easy to forget that Austen was never credited for them during her lifetime, nor made enough money (thanks often to double standards in publishing) to feel truly independent.

While judging what makes a “best” book, however, we went for her six principal novels (if you are suitably keen, you can investigate Lady Susan and other Austen ephemera afterwards). 

Read more: Holocaust Memorial Day: The books to read, from ‘The Volunteer’ to ‘Night’

We chose based on which book most easily stands alone, beloved adaptations aside, and makes a truly enjoyable read where you can create the characters in your head, a joyful participant in Austen’s expertly-drawn world.

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Costa Book of the Year: 2020’s winner and the previous top titles

But, realistically, this ranking could change depending on the year – what matters is that you have six glorious books ahead of you, to read and re-read with relish.

You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections, which are formed from real-world testing and expert advice. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent. 

‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen, published by Penguin Classics

Published six months after Austen’s death in 1817, Persuasion was named by her brother Henry. Anne Elliot is an unlikely heroine by the standards of the romantic novels of the time, being 27 and thus – gasp – practically dead by the standards of the Georgian marriage market. At 19, she was persuaded by relatives to end an engagement to a young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, by dint of the fact he had no prospects. In the present day, her spendthrift family have been persuaded (this time by sensible Anne) to rent out their home and take temporary lodgings in Bath, where Anne encounters Wentworth, now a rich and successful Captain.

She still loves him, but can he forgive her for being persuaded to end their engagement? Several extremely neat plot twists from Austen force them further apart before becoming reunited and the yearning of both characters – older, wiser, and regretful – is utterly compelling. Austen, who experienced her own regretful near-misses in love, brings about a masterful conclusion that wasn’t to be hers. One hopes that she would instead be quietly satisfied at being one of the world’s best-known and best-loved authors two centuries after her death.

‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen, published by Wordsworth Classics

So embedded has the drama between Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy become in all levels of pop culture that you could feel as though you had read it countless times when you’ve only seen parodies. But even if you have seen the exquisite Andrew Davies BBC adaptation (now wedded to Netflix) a million times, there’s plenty that’s new to lap up by going back to the book.

Not only that peerless first line – “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” – but the extra joy from being in Austen’s capable hands, and words, for the duration of the story. As beautiful as the TV version, it was nothing compared to being carried along with Austen’s observations. That is an experience as delightful as being in the company of your cleverest, kindest, and most devastatingly shrewd friend.

‘Northanger Abbey’ by Jane Austen, published by Vintage Classics

This was the first novel that Austen finished writing but due to being caught up by the world’s slowest publisher, was only published after Austen had bought the copyright back – and then died. It is an absolute riot: a dry pastiche of gothic and romance novels that both celebrates, and rolls its eyes at, youthful credulity. It is less immediately accessible, simply because it really benefits from having read books featuring dewy-eyed and slightly dim heroines.

At 17, Catherine Morland is one of 10 children born to a clergyman, and fancies herself “in training for a heroine,” having spent her teens inhaling popular Gothic novels of the time. Austen neatly subverts Catherine’s expectations while ticking off all the plot points of a Gothic romance: from the titular Abbey (annoyingly un-terrifying) to a ghoulish nemesis, a broken engagement, and betrayed confidences. Yet Austen, as ever, keeps the main problems out of fantasy and closer to home. Money is the root of all problems, but fortunately for Catherine, the heroine wins out in the end.

‘Emma by Jane Austen, published by Penguin

Austen flips her tried and trusted financially-troubled heroine narrative with Emma Woodhouse, a filthy rich only child who is the very incarnation of Cher saying, “But mother, I AM a rich man?” Blessed with good looks, charm, and no need to marry, Emma enjoys a life being adored by the minions in her neighbourhood, teasing her childhood friend Knightley, and making matches between any suitable young people who cross her path. 

Her enjoyable life playing dolls with people’s lives and fortunes comes to a juddering halt when she makes some unforgivable errors with a beloved local spinster, and a new young visitor, and comes to realise that through these she runs the risk of losing her own true happiness. Austen is in especially waspish form, directed mostly through Emma’s speech. The own goals, when they come to Emma, are humbling but all pursuant to a very satisfying ending. A hugely enjoyable read about the perils of being too clever by half.

‘Sense and Sensibility’ by Jane Austen, published by Folio Society

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood have cracking names but nothing in the way of a dowry to attract a husband now that the family’s wealth has fallen to their brother and his hideous wife. While sensible Elinor pines after her lost love, Edward Ferrers, dreamy Marianne falls in love with the sexy, flighty Willoughby, whose dramatic tendencies Austen shades wonderfully: “He then departed, to make himself still more interesting, in the midst of a heavy rain.” While none of Austen’s novels are frothy – it’s a serious misnomer that anything with a bonnet must therefore be stupid – Sense and Sensibility ’s darker moments weigh especially heavy because they are so tiring and so familiar to many readers.

The weight of family duty on a woman’s shoulders, when others have no idea of its heft, at a time when a woman must rely on the kindness of others if the burden is ever to be eased. And if Marianne’s marriage to the much-older Colonel Brandon feels a bit of a climbdown after her passionate love of Willoughby, well – at least he’s a decent sort with plenty going on under the surface. And yes, that is a bit of a “meh” and a shrug, but not everything in life can be Alan Rickman.  

‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen, published by Chiltern Classic

Last place is so unfair, so consider this instead “First place, and then the rest of them”. Austen upended more of her familiar heroine traits for M ansfield Park in Fanny Price, who at first glance is the strange, silent mouse to her glamorous adoptive family’s charming parade. Used to a bright, witty and desirable heroine, the reader can feel uneasy at the young girl who, at 10, is given to a rich uncle’s family to be raised and spends the years until she comes of age being mercilessly teased and insulted by various relations and glamorous friends who cannot understand her.

Not pert or bright, or quick with a word or a joke, Fanny Price stays in the shadows, observing until she is able to live. She is treated as nothing, but through the course of the book shows that the moral core that runs through her makes her anything but. Much has been written about Fanny Price, but the best thing to do is to read her.

The verdict: Jane Austen books

Everyone has their own measure of what makes their best Jane Austen book, and Persuasion is ours. We call it her best novel, and our best buy. 

Once you’ve raced through Austen’s back catalogue, you can try Anthony Trollope for more shrewd tales of village life and expertly caricatures. For pure comfort from a later period, but similarly sharp and engaging writing of women fallen on hard times, try Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day , and The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery. Both as enchanting as any of Jane Austen’s heroines.

And if you want the author whom Harper's Bazaar hailed as “the Jane Austen of our time” then head immediately for Jilly Cooper, and her series of romances named after heroines. Imogen and Harriet are especially heavenly.

Find your next favourite read among our round-up of the best historical novels

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Parents' guide to, pride and prejudice.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 6 Reviews
• Kids Say 42 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Masterpiece of romance and manners entertains at any age.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Jane Austen's romantic masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice, is an absolute joy to read and study for teens who are open to the pleasures of 19th-century prose and manners. The plot and characters are engaging for teens, and the book is worth revisiting at any age. Several film…

Why Age 14+?

Characters' worthiness is often judged on the basis of wealth and property.

Wine is occasionally consumed and offered medicinally. One character is describe

No sexual activities are described, but a young girl runs away with her lover an

Any Positive Content?

Most of the young characters in Pride and Prejudice are grappling with securing

Elizabeth and Jane Bennet are perfect models of sisterly love, and Jane in parti

In addition to being greatly entertained, readers of Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pr

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Wine is occasionally consumed and offered medicinally. One character is described as an "indolent" man who drinks and gambles.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

No sexual activities are described, but a young girl runs away with her lover and it is implied that the couple are living together without benefit of marriage -- very scandalous for the time.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Most of the young characters in Pride and Prejudice are grappling with securing or choosing a marriage partner. Austen's message here is that a happy marriage should be built on true love between like-minded people, and that a life partner should be chosen carefully. Couples in the novel who make rash choices or who choose financial security before love come to regret their decisions.

Positive Role Models

Elizabeth and Jane Bennet are perfect models of sisterly love, and Jane in particular is the soul of kindness, always disposed to view acquaintances in a positive light. Elizabeth, who is known to be her father's favorite because she is sensible and smart, makes the occasional error in judgment, but she is generally a very admirable young woman: intelligent, kind, down-to-earth, respectable, and strong. Mr. Darcy, though prideful on the surface, is also generous, trustworthy, and caring.

Educational Value

In addition to being greatly entertained, readers of Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice will learn about life and gender roles among the upper classes in early 19th-century England. Teen readers may be surprised and amused by the rigid rules of conduct imposed on young women of that place and time. The occupations of "gentlemen" are also touched on, as well as cultural activities of the period, such as the music and dancing that people enjoyed.

Parents need to know that Jane Austen's romantic masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice, is an absolute joy to read and study for teens who are open to the pleasures of 19th-century prose and manners. The plot and characters are engaging for teens, and the book is worth revisiting at any age. Several film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice are also well worth seeing, including the 2005 movie starring Keira Knightley and the superb 1995 BBC series featuring Colin Firth as Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth. However, young people will get maximum enjoyment from this story if they read the novel first.

Where to Read

Parent and kid reviews.

• Parents say (6)
• Kids say (42)

Based on 6 parent reviews

Educational but Entertaining

What's the story.

The five single Bennet girls of Longbourne have somewhat dubious prospects for marriage, because their father, though a gentleman, has no male heir and his estate is "entailed" away to his next male relation. So, Mrs. Bennet is extremely eager to find rich husbands for her daughters. When the Bennets become acquainted with a new neighbor, the wealthy Mr. Bingley, and his proud friend Mr. Darcy, first impressions lead to some hard feelings as well as romantic ones. Bingley becomes quickly attached to one of the girls, whereas Darcy leaves the Bennets and their friends cold. First impressions are not always what they seem, however, and the Bennet girls, particularly Elizabeth and Jane, learn where pride and trust are justified, and where they are not, as the romantic story unfolds.

Is It Any Good?

Austen gives you brave and good heroes and heroines, despicable villains, a decent dose of comic relief, a great and complex plot, and plenty of suspense of the mostly restrained, emotional variety. Austen's clever observations and dialogue contribute to her brilliance in developing fully formed characters, despite the polite manners throughout. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are two of the most romantic and memorable characters in the whole of English literature, and their story never fails to entertain.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about gender roles in Pride and Prejudice. What are Elizabeth and her sisters allowed to do or not do in terms of their occupations and social behavior? How is a young woman's life different from a young man's in the world of the novel?

One of the themes Austen explores at length in Pride and Prejudice and in other novels is the compatibility and feelings that make a happy marriage. In the context of the book, what marriages are successful and which are not? What does Austen see as requirements for happiness in married life?

Jane Austen's novels are often compared and contrasted with the Brontes' darker, more gothic romances. How are the novels by these female novelists different, and how are they similar?

Why is Pride and Prejudice considered a classic of English literature?

Book Details

• Author : Jane Austen
• Genre : Literary Fiction
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date : January 28, 1813
• Number of pages : 368
• Last updated : June 8, 2015

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What to read next.

Pride & Prejudice

Sense and Sensibility

Becoming Jane

Classic books for kids.

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A Summary and Analysis of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Pride and Prejudice , published in 1813, is Jane Austen’s best-known and probably most widely studied novel. But what does the novel mean? What is it really all about? And where did that title, Pride and Prejudice , come from?

Before we attempt to answer some of these questions, it might be worth recapping the plot of Austen’s novel. So, before our analysis of Pride and Prejudice , here’s a brief plot summary.

Pride and Prejudice : plot summary

A wealthy man named Mr Bingley moves to the area, and Mrs Bennet – mother of five daughters – tells her husband to call on the eligible young bachelor. A match between Bingley and the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane, is soon in the works – but a match between another rich bachelor, Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, and the second-eldest Bennet daughter, Elizabeth, looks less likely.

This is because Mr Darcy’s pride – his haughty attitude towards Elizabeth Bennet and her family – sour her view towards him, while Elizabeth’s prejudice towards Mr Darcy is also a stumbling-block. After he acts in an arrogant and disdainful way towards her at a ball, she learns from a young soldier, Mr George Wickham, that Darcy apparently mistreated him.

Wickham is the son of a man who used to be Darcy’s steward or servant, and Darcy acted unkindly towards the young George. Darcy’s and Bingley’s sisters conspire to drive a wedge between Mr Bingley and Jane Bennet because they believe Bingley can find a wife from a better social station than the Bennets.

Meanwhile, Darcy also has an arrogant aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who acts as patroness to a clergyman named Mr Collins, who in turn flatters her with disgusting servility. (Mr Collins is also Mr Bennet’s nephew: since Mr and Mrs Bennet have no sons, Mr Bennet’s estate is due to pass to Mr Collins when Mr Bennet dies.)

Mr Collins is encouraged to ask one of the Bennet sisters for her hand in marriage, and he decides upon Elizabeth. She, however, turns him down, and he marries Charlotte Lucas instead.

The happy couple get together, and Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, but it’s clear he still views her and her family with some contempt because he is of a higher social status than they are. She responds by citing George Wickham’s accusations against him; she also thinks he played a part in breaking up the match between her sister, Jane, and Bingley.

However, in a later letter to her, Darcy reveals that Wickham cannot be trusted: he is a womaniser and a liar. Elizabeth visits Darcy’s home, Pemberley, while visiting the north of England with her aunt and uncle. Darcy welcomes them and introduces them to his sister.

Darcy’s words about Wickham are proved true, as the soldier elopes with Lydia, the youngest of the five Bennet sisters. Darcy tracks the two lovebirds down and persuades them to marry so Lydia is made an honest woman of. Bingley and Jane finally get engaged, and Darcy and Elizabeth overcome their ‘pride and prejudice’ and become a couple.

Pride and Prejudice : analysis

In his vast study of plot structures, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories , Christopher Booker suggests that Pride and Prejudice is more straightforwardly in the ‘comedy’ genre than it may first appear to be. He points out that much of the novel turns on misunderstandings, characters misreading others’ intentions or others’ personalities, and people generally getting things wrong: the Bennets think Mr Wickham is the wronged one and Darcy the villain, but it turns out that they have this the wrong way around.

So what used to be more explicit in, say, stage comedies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – indeed, going right back to Shakespeare – is made more subtle and internalised in Austen’s novel, and rather than having her characters literally confuse one person with another (because of some absurd coincidence, wearing similar clothing, and so on), her characters find they have misread a person’s motive or misjudged their honesty, as with Mr Wickham.

This is why the title of the novel is so important: Darcy and Elizabeth’s union at the end of the novel strikes us as true because they have had to overcome their own personal flaws, which prevent a union between them, but having done so they have an honest and realistic appraisal of each other’s personality. They have, if you like, ‘seen’ each other.

We might contrast this with the various illusions and misapprehensions in the novel, or the other motivations driving people together (Mr Collins trying to woo Elizabeth simply because she’s the next Bennet sister in the list).

Is  Pride and Prejudice  a late Augustan work or a novel belonging to Romanticism? Romanticism was largely a reaction against Augustan values: order, rationalism, and the intellect were tempered if not wholly replaced by the Romantic values of freedom, emotion, and individualism.

But whether we should regard  Pride and Prejudice  as Augustan or Romantic is a question that divides critics. Terry Eagleton, in The English Novel: An Introduction , points out that Austen was not somebody who trusted wholly in the supremacy of reason, not least because her beliefs – what Eagleton calls her Tory Christian pessimism, which made her alert to the flawed nature of all human beings – would not allow her to be so. Austen is aware that human beings are imperfect and, at times, irrational.

And in this connection, it is worth pondering what Andrew H. Wright observes in Jane Austen’s Novels, a Study in Structure : that the reason Elizabeth Bennet, rather than Jane, is the real heroine of  Pride and Prejudice  is that Jane is not flawed enough. She is too perfect: something that would make her the ideal heroine for most novels, but the very reason she cannot be the protagonist of a Jane Austen novel.

Austen is too interested in the intricate and complex mixture of good and bad, as Wright points out: Austen likes the explore the flaws and foibles of her characters. Elizabeth, in being taken in by Wickham and his lies and in misjudging (or at least partly misjudging) Darcy, is flawed because both her pride  and  prejudice need tempering with a more nuanced understanding of the man she will marry.

The opening line of Pride and Prejudice is arguably the most famous opening line of any novel: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ But what is less widely known is that the tone of this opening line is clearly ironic.

Far from being Austen the detached, impartial narrator, this is actually Austen ventriloquising her characters’ thoughts – specifically, those of Mrs Bennet, whose views in the novel are often derided by Austen’s narrator – using a narrative technique which Austen did so much to pioneer.

This technique is known as free indirect speech , and it is what makes Austen’s prose so full of wit and surprise, so we always have to keep an ear out for her narrators’ arch commentary on the characters and situations being described. (The clue in this opening line is in the phrase ‘universally acknowledged’, since how many things in life really are truly universally acknowledged?)

Pride and Prejudice was originally titled First Impressions , but that eventual title, Pride and Prejudice , was a cliché even when Austen used it for her novel. The phrase is found in two important works of the 1770s, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .

But the most important precursor to Austen’s novel by a long way is Fanny Burney’s 1782 novel Cecilia , in which that phrase, ‘pride and prejudice’, appears three times in rapid succession, with the words ‘pride’ and ‘prejudice’ capitalised: ‘The whole of this unfortunate business, said Dr Lyster, has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. […] if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.’

Austen learned a great deal from Burney, and refined the comedy of manners which Burney had helped to pioneer several decades earlier.

Pride and Prejudice is, in the last analysis, one of the great comedies in the English language, because in its construction it takes the hallmarks of romantic comedy and refines them, making subtle and abstract what was literal and physical in earlier stage comedies.

It is also a novel about how true love needs to be founded on empirical fact: we need to know the person we’re marrying, to see them with our own eyes, rather than rely on others’ opinion or let ourselves be blinded by romantic notions and delusions.

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1 thought on “A Summary and Analysis of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice”

It’s a brilliant romantic novel, but, yes, it’s a comedy as well. Mr Collins, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and even Mrs Bennet verge on the pantomimish sometimes, and Miss Bingley is so bitchy that she’d have fitted very well into Dallas or Dynasty :-) .

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Sense and sexuality

Maria Bello and Hugh Dancy in "The Jane Austen Book Club."

Jane Austen wrote six novels, which are pillars of English literature in spite of being delightful, wise, warm and beloved. Robin Swicord’s “The Jane Austen Book Club” centers on its six members, who meet over six months to discuss the novels, which seem to have an uncanny relevance to events in their own lives, just as the newspaper horoscope always seems to be about you. No, it is not necessary to have read the novels or seen all the Jane Austen movie adaptations, but that would add another dimension to your appreciation of this film.

What you need to know is that Austen is usually concerned about her heroine’s struggle to find the right romantic partner for her , despite her rivals, class prejudice, her own diffidence, the blindness of her loved one, the obstinacy of her family and economic necessities. You could say that Austen created Chick Lit and therefore Chick Flicks. You could, but I would not, because I despise those terms as sexist and ignorant. As a man, I would hate to have my tastes condescended to by the opposite of Chick Lit, which, according to Gloria Steinem, is Prick Lit. I read Jane Austen for a simple reason, not gender-related: I cannot put her down and often return to her in times of trouble.

Remarkable, that a woman who died at 41 in 1817 should still be so popular, with all her books in print in countless editions, inspiring movies that routinely win Oscars, and is the subject Karen Joy Fowler’s best-selling The Jane Austen Book Club and her life the subject another 2007 movie, “ Becoming Jane .” One edition of her Pride and Prejudice ranks above 2,000 on Amazon’s best-selling fiction list, surprising if you reflect there are at least nine other current editions of the same novel on sale. (“See all 8,882 search findings,” Amazon offered, but I didn’t have the nerve.)

The movie is a celebration of reading, and oddly enough that works, even though there is nothing cinematic about a shot of a woman (or the club’s one male member) reading a book. Such shots are used as punctuation in the film, where they work like Ozu’s “pillow shots,” quiet respites from the action. The only drawback to them from my point of view was that all the characters seem to be reading standard editions — not a Folio Society subscriber among them.

The club is founded by Bernadette ( Kathy Baker ), a woman of (naturally) about 60, who has been divorced (of course) six times. She thinks it will help console her friend Jocelyn ( Maria Bello ), who as the film opens is attending a funeral for her beloved Rhodesian ridgeback. Any woman who has an expensive service for her dog needs a man in her life. Or maybe not. Maybe she’s got it figured out.

The club membership grows by adding other emotionally needy members. Prudie ( Emily Blunt ) is a miserable high school French teacher who was planning her first trip to France, only to have her younger and distant husband ( Marc Blucas ) call it off for unspecified “business reasons.” Sylvia ( Amy Brenneman ) is being divorced by Daniel ( Jimmy Smits ), despite her illusion that theirs is a happy marriage. Sylvia’s lesbian daughter Allegra ( Maggie Grace ), also has a romantic crisis going and is closeted from her mother, though not from us. Circling in Prudie’s life is her mother ( Lynn Redgrave ), an ex-hippie pothead who is not a bit like Austen’s formidable dowagers, except that she meddles.

And there is a male member of the club, Grigg ( Hugh Dancy ), who Jocelyn wants to pair off with Sylvia, although he would like to pair off with her, something she does not see because like many an Austen heroine she is blind! blind! to true love that is staring her right in the eyes. Grigg is not, shall we say, a born reader of Jane Austen; he prefers science fiction, although his tastes are admirable and he is forever promoting Ursula K. Le Guin.

These six meet at one another’s houses, their discussions intercut with developments in their private lives, which they share, sometimes obliquely, at the meetings. In this process, they demonstrate how great books can illuminate and counsel us all. The person who does not read is often under the impression that he’s being picked on by fate. A reader knows it’s necessary because of the story line.

Some will quibble and cavil that the movie is too contrived: six books, six members, six sets of problems, six, six, six (and sex, of course). Contrivance is actually part of the appeal. One of the reasons we return to Austen, Dickens, Trollope and the estimable Mrs. Gaskell is that their novels are contrived. The structure and ultimate destination are easily foreseeable, but what’s fascinating are their characters, how they think and talk, how colorful and urgent they are, and how blind! blind! they are to what they should surely do if only we could advise them.

I settled down with this movie as with a comfortable book. I expected no earth-shaking revelations and got none, and everything turned out about right, in a clockwork ending that reminded me of the precision the Victorians always used to tidy up their loose ends.

It is crucial, I think, that writer-director Swicord (author of the screenplays for “ Little Women ,” “ Memoirs of a Geisha ” and “ The Perez Family “) has created characters who really do seem to have read the books and talk like they have. And she has created a book club that, like all book clubs, is really about its members. Chick Flick indeed! Guys, take your best buddy to see this movie. Tell him, “It’s really cool, dude, even though there aren’t any eviscerations.”

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Jane Austen Book Club

• Kathy Baker as Bernadette
• Nancy Travis as Cat
• Lynn Redgrave as Sky
• Maggie Grace as Allegra
• Hugh Dancy as Grigg
• Emily Blunt as Prudie
• Amy Brenneman as Sylvia
• Jimmy Smits as Daniel
• Maria Bello as Jocelyn

Based on the book by

• Karen Joy Fowler

Written and directed by

• Robin Swicord

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Pride and Prejudice: Book Review, Summary & Analysis

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Book: Pride and Prejudice

• Originally published: January 28, 1813
• Author: Jane Austen
• Genres: Romance novel, Fiction, Regency romance, Satire, Novel of manners
• Characters: Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. William Collins
• Book sales: 20 million copies

About the Author: Jane Austen

Excerpts from the original text.

"How shameful what I did!" she exclaimed, "I've always been proud of myself, thinking that I can tell right from wrong!-I have always regarded myself very high and thought that I was good at it! I often look down on my sister. This kind of tolerance and kindness, often showing useless suspicion, to satisfy one's vanity-how shame this thing shakes out!-But it should be really shameful! If I really fall in love, I can’t be blinded to be more pathetic than this! But I’m stupid not because I’m falling in love, but because I’m stupid. ——Just when we first met, if someone has a good impression of me, I’m happy. , The other person ignored me, and I became angry. Therefore, no matter which of them, I provoke prejudice and ignorance, and drive away reason. Until now, I No one knows it." —— Quoted from page 168 

Book Summary  

Book Review  and Analysis

• The rich connotation can make the eyes bright; 
• Good communication skills show personal charm; 
• It has to be a little bit Young talents attract attention; 
• A healthy body and mind can give people a sense of vitality; 
• Sincere feelings, no matter whether they are relatives or friends(people with true temperaments can attract people with true temperaments); 
• There is a mind that can accommodate(A narrow-minded person is easily disgusting); 
• Everyone's demeanor(can be understood as a self-confident temperament); 
• A strong heart and can withstand pressure; 
• Vanity must be appropriate and not excessive; 
• Easy to get along with; 
• Self-esteem, and self-love. 

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By Sophie Gee

• Published July 21, 2020 Updated April 27, 2021

AUSTEN YEARS A Memoir in Five Novels By Rachel Cohen

Alongside global Covid-19 and racial injustice, Rachel Cohen’s memoir about seven years spent reading Jane Austen may seem a welcome diversion or a silly distraction. Cohen herself, a reader of James Baldwin and the Russian poets, is initially “appalled” by her “condition” as a Janeite. But “Austen Years” is a thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer’s commitment to another, in which Cohen, who is also the author of “A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists” and “Bernard Berenson: A Life in Pictures,” entrusts her own thoughts and feelings to a great writer’s craft.

Austen complained in a letter to her sister that “Pride and Prejudice” was “too light, & bright, & sparkling; it wants shade.” Cohen provides ample shade for all five of Austen’s major novels. She writes about starting life as a mother in Cambridge, Mass., while in deep mourning for her recently deceased father. She describes a long, often tortuous relationship with her husband, a friend from her days as a Harvard undergraduate. She tackles her father’s work on the role of imagination in organization theory. And though Austen is seemingly an odd match for such material, “Austen Years” is full of neat observations and provocative comparisons, folded into the story with a subtlety that keeps Cohen’s sense from getting sententious.

Father-daughter relationships are among the most vivid in Austen’s novels, and Austen was close with her own father, the Rev. George Austen, who sent the manuscript of “First Impressions” out for publication years before she rewrote it, after his death, as “Pride and Prejudice.” There, as in “Sense and Sensibility,” intimacy between sisters is also paramount. Cohen, who is close with her only sister, is alert to the nuances of sisterly conflicts, saying of “Sense and Sensibility”: “I thought what I wanted was Elinor’s relief, of at last being acknowledged and appreciated. But I think what I really wanted was Marianne’s grasp of the relationship between their two situations.”

Cohen pays close attention to gaps of time in Austen’s life, such as the years she lived without a permanent home, after her father’s death, before she rewrote and published her first novels. A period in which “the world had been through the Terror and many years of the Napoleonic Wars, and the close-knit Austen family had become far-flung.” Cohen reflects that sufferings become layered over time: the loss of a father; the loss of conditions needed to write; Austen’s private longing for a pianoforte. Austen’s novels become acts of revision, do-overs that correct narratives, showing us what was missing from them before.

Cohen is very interested in how Austen appears to writers of color, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose readings of “Jane Awesome” shape his own writing. Cohen’s commitment to reading Austen in an explicitly antiracist way generates some of the book’s most interesting passages, especially when she recounts Austen’s support for abolition, which nonspecialists may not be aware of. She explains the provocatively resonant title of “Mansfield Park,” set on an estate that depended for its wealth on a sugar plantation in Antigua. Lord Mansfield was an 18th-century judge whose decisions were landmarks in the push to abolish the English slave trade, which at the time was the largest in the world.

With considerable deftness, Cohen shows how Austen writes and rewrites versions of herself: “In ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ Elinor and Marianne struggle to grieve and to be known to each other; in ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ Elizabeth is all resilience, rapidity, light. In ‘Mansfield Park’ … Fanny laboriously tries to join the forgotten past to the unknown future, and is frequently mute. Emma is alert, magnificent, often wrong, but her voice is absolutely clear.” Austen becomes Cohen’s enduring companion through the joys and troubles of love and motherhood and the grief of a major loss. The novels reveal ways in which seemingly irreconcilable feelings are inextricably bound together. Lightness revisits and illuminates grief.

Sophie Gee is a professor of English at Princeton. She is finishing a book about eating rituals, intimacy and global migration in the 18th century titled “The Lord’s Supper, the Barbarous Feast and the Rise of the Novel.”

AUSTEN YEARS A Memoir in Five Novels By Rachel Cohen 288 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

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The Best Fiction Books » Classic English Literature

Pride and prejudice (book), by jane austen.

Pride and Prejudice was published more than 200 years ago, in 1813, but the book still speaks to us across the centuries. Written by Jane Austen when she was only 20, its original title was First Impressions . Like many great books, it was initially rejected by publishers and did not appear till years later, now under the title we know it by, Pride and Prejudice . By then, Austen had already had commercial success with Sense and Sensibility , a novel that also compares and contrasts two characters with the qualities (flaws) signalled in the title of the book.

Recommendations from our site

“I think it’s always been my favourite, as it’s many people’s favourite among Austen’s novels. But I was always vaguely embarrassed by that as a scholar, because I didn’t think it was the best.” Read more...

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“The book is about the pleasure of being wrong. We forget that wrongness can be deeply pleasurable, but thankfully we have literature and art to remind us.” Read more...

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Kathryn Schulz , Journalist

“This book is one of the perfect novels, in style and plot and characters. I think it is easy to overlook quite how inspiring it was when it insisted on a woman’s right to marry for love.” Read more...

Books that Changed the World

Amanda Craig , Journalist

“It’s a coming-of-age story, because she throws aside her prejudices but also sees the house and realises that she could be quite comfortable and maybe realises how important that is.” Read more...

The best books on Coming of Age

Meg Rosoff , Children's Author

“As the novel goes on they both re-learn how to judge one another, they re-evaluate the other’s moral worth. Among many other things, Pride and Prejudice is an exploration of moral epistemology.” Read more...

The best books on Ideas that Matter

A C Grayling , Philosopher

“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point…I had not seen ‘Pride & Prejudice’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face…I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses”

Charlotte Brontë to GH Lewes, 12 January 1848, quoted in The Brontes: A Life in Letters, by Juliet Barker

“Read again and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.”

Sir Walter Scott, Journal, March, 1826

“The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in fact of her unconsciousness: as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarrassment, she sometimes, over her work basket, her tapestry flowers, in the spare, cool drawing-room of other days, fell a-musing, lapsed too metaphorically, as one may say, into wool-gathering, and her dropped stitches, of these pardonable, of these precious moments, were afterwards picked up as little touches of human truth, little glimpses of steady vision, little master-strokes of imagination.”

Henry James, quoted in David Dowling (ed) Novelists on Novelists

“She did not know enough of the world to be a great novelist. She had not the ambition to be a great novelist. She knew her place”

Arnold Bennett, quoted in Jane Austen: Critical Assessments, edited by Ian Littlewood

Other books by Jane Austen

Sense and sensibility by jane austen, mansfield park by jane austen, emma by jane austen, persuasion by jane austen, jane austen's manuscript works by jane austen, our most recommended books, great expectations by charles dickens, jane eyre by charlotte brontë, wuthering heights by emily brontë, twelfth night by william shakespeare, the portrait of a lady by henry james, william wordsworth: the major works by stephen gill (editor).

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Actually, Emma is the Best Jane Austen Novel

On the 200th anniversary of a classic, an argument for its greatness.

Jane Austen’s Emma , which came out 200 years ago today, may not be as popular with audiences as Pride and Prejudice , but it’s become the novel that critics consider her masterpiece. Its hero Mr. Knightley hasn’t spawned any swoony Colin Firth-Mr. Darcy screen-equivalents, and its heroine, a pioneering “rich bitch,” may prove hard to stomach, especially when she’s compared to the incomparable Elizabeth Bennet.

Even so, Emma is no pop culture slouch. The story has found its own notable adapters and actors. The screenwriter who gave us the cult-classic Cat People (1942) is responsible for an early dramatization, Romances by Emma (1938). Amy Heckerling wrote and directed the Emma -inspired teen movie mega-hit Clueless (1995). Gwyneth Paltrow, before she consciously uncoupled and Gooped us, portrayed a highly regarded Emma (1996). Pemberley Digital tackled the story with its vlog series, Emma Approved (2013-14). Yet fewer readers today move on from Pride and Prejudice to devour Emma from cover to cover, perhaps because it’s a far more challenging read.

You can gather that much from its first words, which communicate no ironic truths universally acknowledged. What Emma ’s opening has in common with the famous first line of Pride and Prejudice is that both pack a quick, powerful punch: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to united some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. . . ”

Critics tend to light on that tricky word “seemed” and the introduction’s foreboding sense of distressing vexation yet to come. Centuries of readers, however, have come to the end of these lines and simply wondered, “Am I supposed to like her or not?”

It’s a great question. It’s the kind of thing we continue to ask ourselves today, when confronted with rich bitches from Gloria Vanderbilt, to Paris Hilton, to the Kardashians. Jane Austen was onto something. How much can we—should we–embrace women, in fiction and IRL, whose lives, if not their very persons, are enviably “better” than ours, more attractive, more comfortable, and seemingly happier? Do we admire them, judge them, or both? Are we secretly pleased when they, too, encounter life’s inevitable obstacles, or do we feel sorry for them? So much depends on their likeability, on how heavily or lightly they wield their power.

In first introducing her Emma to readers, Austen doesn’t choose a word like “wealthy” or “affluent,” employing instead a crass, ugly synonym with judgmental, Biblical overtones: rich. And not only rich. Emma’s clever, too—another loaded word—not “accomplished” or “intelligent.” Clever signals craftiness, although in the early nineteenth century it could also mean active, skillful, handy, or handsome.

“Handsome” is the one word in Emma ’s opening that most often trips up readers today. The assumption is that it must be there as a kind of insult or to communicate Emma’s quasi-manliness. Not necessarily. The Oxford English Dictionary is helpful here, reminding us that in Austen’s time, when a woman was called “handsome,” it signaled her being “striking, stately, as opposed to conventionally beautiful or pretty.” Handsome communicated a kind of deep, powerful elegance, not a predictable, innocuous cute. From its first sentence, this is a novel fighting a literary battle against the impulse to venerate defenseless, sweet protagonists.

We still have complicated responses to women who have more, look better, and do more, and worst of all, don’t seem all that apologetic about it. (Demi Lovato’s “What’s Wrong With Being Confident?” shouldn’t even be a rhetorical question.) We might call it the “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful” predicament. Its most recent incarnation seems to be the brouhaha over “Resting Bitch Face,” a concept brought to bear most often on exceptionally beautiful, powerful female faces, which some would prefer to glimpse only if obsequiously smiling.

Jane Austen’s Emma is, in its own way, a precursor response to the phenomenon of resting bitch face. The RBF is to expectations for celebrity beauty what Emma Woodhouse is to the typical classic novel’s heroine. She makes us uncomfortable but in a good way. She breaks the mold, revealing the unreasonable limitations of old patterns. Early nineteenth-century fiction tended to be made up of modestly perfect, wrongly victimized Cinderellas. Temporarily without happiness, comfort, or blessings, these heroines usually turned out to have unimpeachable pedigrees. That way no reader could be made to feel uncomfortable when they came into money. (“She made it the old fashioned way. She was born to it.”)

In Austen’s version, Emma was born to it, and she never loses it. Over the course of the novel, though, she’s compelled to realize how to better wield the power of a rich bitch. She learns that in leveraging her advantages, as we might say today, she ought not to try to mold those around her to her will.

Jane Austen is said to have quipped, on the subject of her groundbreaking creation, “I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.” This could be a statement laden with a degree of her signature humor and irony. But although Austen may have been bitchy, she definitely wasn’t rich. She wasn’t writing from personal experience on this one.

As readers, many of us defy Austen’s expectations, as she no doubt realized we would. We finish Emma not only having sympathy for but discovering some reluctant micro-identification with the cosseted Emma. We can approve her power all the more readily because she admits fallibility and shows she’s educable. She learns how to use her social and economic power more selflessly and generously—with someone other than her father, that is. It’s hard to know how Emma’s example translates to an era of “leaning in” for women, but surely there is something there for today’s rich bitches to heed. Surely they could learn a thing or two from Emma.

So, too, could readers of all classes and backgrounds. Emma ’s brilliance—its enduring status as a masterpiece of fiction—is that it puts us in the position of the less-clever-than-she-thinks-she-is heroine. Reading the novel for the first time, as it’s narrated from Emma’s self-righteous perspective, we miss many of the plot’s cues and clues. Like Emma, we smugly over-read, we misjudge, and we scoff at characters to whom we feel superior, like the know-it-all upstart meddler, Mrs. Elton, or the garrulous spinster in reduced circumstances, Miss Bates.

Austen’s trick is to make us all temporarily into rich-bitch readers. She’s not heavy handed about it. She shows us how, by being coaxed into sympathy with an uber-fortunate, commanding heroine, we might come to wield our own power better as readers of fiction, too. Once you’ve read Emma , it’s hard to go back to those humble damsel-protagonists, and that’s a very good thing, too. They look trite and tired by comparison, whereas Emma still surprises, delights, and, yes, instructs, two centuries on.

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Jane Austen’s Novels Are Darker Than You Think

Jane Austen’s Darkness by julia yost wiseblood books, 86 pages, $8

A glance at the cover of Julia Yost’s short book on Jane Austen is enough to tell you this isn’t your typical study of Austen. No flowers or formal gardens, no manor houses, no pastels or swirls—only the shocking title, Jane Austen’s Darkness , in stark white letters against a pitch-black background. You can judge this book by its cover.

Darkness pervades Austen’s novels: in the conspiracy of “the dead hand of primogeniture and the selfishness of the living” that reduces the Dashwoods to “the genteel precariat”; in the imagery of illness, imprisonment, and corruption that makes Mansfield Park feel oppressively “claustral,” and not only for Fanny Price; in the cruelty of characters like Aunt Norris, who has made it her life’s mission to remind Fanny she’s “a nobody who deserves nothing”; in the “unequal marriage, the condition of being ‘unable to respect your partner in life.’” “Marriage is the heroine’s only defense against darkness,” writes Yost, “and with one sparkling exception, it is a shaky one.”

Readers gloss over the shadows because we read Austen through the glittering lens of Pride and Prejudice : “If Elizabeth Bennet marries brilliantly, so must Elinor Dashwood and Fanny Price and Jane Fairfax. If Pemberley exemplifies great-house Toryism, so must Mansfield.” But Elinor Dashwood is no Elizabeth Bennet; she falls into “nonsense” when she appraises Edward Ferrars too generously, exemplifying “the fashion for praising mediocrity as excellence when it appears in those with money.” Ferrars is no Darcy; he is an “unambitious nullity—which . . . is as much as to say he is an elder son.”

We also brighten the shadows because our delight in Austen’s wit can make us forget just how mordant it is. When, for instance, Edward speaks “prettily” about engagement, Austen adds gloomily, hilariously, “What he might say on the subject a twelvemonth after, must be referred to the imagination of husbands and wives.” 

Drawing on a 1940 essay by D. W. Harding, Yost makes “regulated hatred” a centerpiece of her assessment. Social convention, Harding observed, exists to enable stupid, evil people to live together in a degree of civilized harmony. The cost, Yost notes, is to allow “detestable people [to] pass as ordinary, polite, prestigious.” Austen’s morally upright characters see and despise the petty wickedness beneath the taffeta gestures: “Hatred should be regulated but is very often called for.” To be good, one must learn to be a good hater.

Mr. Darcy best embodies this virtue: “In his ‘propensity to hate every body’ . . . Darcy was ahead of the curve.” Darcy is almost never rude to the lowly, and his servants testify to his fair treatment. But he’s deliberately impolite to “empty-headed” William Lucas, cruel Caroline Bingley, feckless Wickham, his controlling aunt, Lady Catherine. Elizabeth Bennet hates right along with him, showing contempt for Lady Catherine and sensible embarrassment at her family’s conduct. In this as in so much else, Elizabeth is made in her creator’s image. 

Regulated hatred is the cornerstone of a virtuous community. Darcy’s wealth affords him the luxury of selective association; poor people are thrust into relations of dependence with people they’d sooner avoid. But properly directed hatred as much as wealth allows the Darcys to form a virtuous society at Pemberley following their marriage. They exclude the George Wickhams of the world and keep the Lady Catherines in check. Eager, easygoing Charles and Jane Bingley are nearly as rich but lack moral stature because they haven’t learned to hate.

Sometimes Yost finds darkness where Austen leaves glimmers of light. Fanny’s self-denial looks pious, she writes, but “her morality is a slave morality . . . not extricable from her self-image as a nobody.” Fanny Price is the most-criticized Austen heroine, and while there is something to Yost’s critique, it is clear that Austen herself regarded her as a moral exemplar; with the exception of Anne Elliot, she is the only Austen heroine not treated with irony. Fanny never makes any serious misjudgments; Elizabeth Bennet does. While Fanny lacks Elizabeth’s strength, she, too, is a good hater, as she condemns and sees through the play-acting of the dissolute young people of Mansfield Park. Fanny’s role in the novel is to provide a moral compass, and she succeeds; her moral seriousness earns honorable mention in Yost’s pantheon of good haters. While Fanny’s marriage to Edmund Bertram won’t have the joy and solidity of the Darcys of Pemberley, hers is still a happy ending that matches, however imperfectly, merit and reward. 

Crisp and witty, Jane Austen’s Darkness is bigger inside than out. I’ve encountered no book or essay on Austen with so much insight per sentence. By attending to Austen’s darkness, Yost casts fresh light in every direction.

Peter J. Leithart is president of Theopolis Institute. 

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Image by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, in the public domain. Image cropped. 

Articles by Peter J. Leithart

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Emma by Jane Austen | Book Review

Posted by: Editor September 29, 2011 in Author , Books , Classic , English Leave a comment Updated: October 27, 2016

Published in 1816, “ Emma ” is considered a Jane Austen masterpiece, second best in her works after “Pride and Prejudice”. It was the last of her published works during her life.

“Emma” is a story of a beautiful, rich and clever girl who finds her share of love after and in spite of a lot of mistakes on her part.

Emma Woodhouse lives with her doting father and is mistress of the house at quite a young age as her mother passed away long before and her elder sister Isabella is happily married and lives in London. The story begins with Emma’s governess, and one of her most intimate friends for long time, Ms. Taylor getting married to Mr. Weston and leaving her. Mr. Woodhouse is an old man with settled habits who doesn’t like things to change. Emma, having everything a girl of her age could wish for i.e., beauty, money and intelligence, is left on her own to find some occupation and amusement for herself.

Perfect, though Emma seems, she has her faults: lack of resolution to engage herself seriously in her studies, a want of consideration in her behaviour to others at times and a tendency to make matches for people around her, to name a few. Mr. Knightley, an intimate friend of the family and Isabella’s brother-in-law, is the only one of their regular and near acquaintance who reproaches Emma on such points, now and then.

After Ms. Taylor’s marriage, Emma befriends a pretty, orphan girl called Harriet who is studying at a boarding school in the village and takes it in her head that she should marry a gentleman of her acquaintance, Mr. Elton. Despite Mr. Knightley’s cautioning her against doing anything to propel the match, Emma successfully convinces Harriet about her being in love with Mr. Elton.

She also persuades her to say no to the marriage proposal by a respectable young man, who manages his farm. But alas, Mr. Elton declares himself to be in love with Emma instead. When rejected by Emma, he leaves the village and returns only after securing a wealthy woman as his wife.

Meanwhile, Mr. Weston’s son from first marriage, Frank Churchill, comes to the village to meet his mother-in-law and everybody thinks him the most suitable match for Emma. Frank, who is handsome, an heir to his maternal uncle whose surname he has adopted and well-behaved soon becomes a part of Emma’s circle of friends. Another addition to the circle is a beautiful and accomplished girl of Emma’s age called Jane. Jane is an orphan and have been at school to attain such skills as would enable her to earn her livelihood by becoming a governess. She has come to visit her aunt and grandmother who are very good friends of the Woodhouses.

Though Emma and Frank do like talking to each other, and to every other eye they seem to be flirting with each other, Emma’s actual intention is to secure Frank for Harriet. But, after many interesting ups and downs, a secret is finally revealed: Frank Churchill has been secretly engaged for last six months to none other than Jane and it was after Jane that he came to the village in the first place.

Emma’s friends feel bad for Emma and Emma feels bad for Harriet, but as much as Emma’s feelings were untouched by Frank, Emma discovers that Harriet also does not have any tender feelings for Frank. Who is Harriet in love with then for last few months? And why does that knowledge comes as a bolt of lightening (painful but illuminating) to Emma? Does Emma really know her heart? Is she in love with someone without realising it? Will she find her man at last, who would love and cherish her as she is?

Full of interesting characters and their intertwined stories of courtships and loves, “Emma” is a highly eventful tale where characters appear to be chasing one another in the game of love. And where there is love, there is misunderstanding, jealously and heart breaks.

Jane Austen’s mastery in dealing with romances between people of different natural dispositions, characters, temperament and social status is well displayed here. The book is a lot of fun to read as you encounter the courtships and their results one after another revealing the idiocies and discontinuities in the human characters, who appear at times their best and/or their worst depending on their circumstances.

A witty, funny, totally entertaining story…………..Enjoy reading…..

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