Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice follows Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five sisters whose mother is desperate to marry them off. When the wealthy, amiable Mr. Bingley takes a nearby estate, he is drawn to gentle Jane Bennet—but his proud friend Mr. Darcy makes a poor first impression on the sharp-witted Elizabeth. Misled by Wickham's false account of Darcy and repelled by Darcy's own arrogance, Elizabeth rejects his unexpected proposal. Only gradually, through his quiet interventions and her own re-examination, does aversion give way to understanding and love. Along the way, the foolish Mr. Collins, the scheming Lydia, and a gallery of comic characters complicate the path to marriage.
Beneath its sparkling comedy, the novel probes pride, prejudice, and the slow correction of misjudgment. Austen anatomizes a world where women's security depends on marriage, exposing the pressures of class, money, and reputation with incomparable irony. Its perfect construction, unforgettable characters, and brilliant dialogue make it her quintessential masterpiece.
How it begins
Walt Whitman has somewhere a fine and just distinction between “loving by allowance” and “loving with personal love.” This distinction applies to books as well as to men and women; and in the case of the not very numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it brings a curious consequence with it. There is much more difference as to their best work than in the case of those others who are loved “by allowance” by convention, and because it is felt to be the right and proper thing to love them. And in the sect—fairly large and yet unusually choice—of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels. To some the delightful freshness and humour of Northanger Abbey, its completeness, finish, and entrain, obscure the undoubted critical facts that its scale is small, and its scheme, after all, that of burlesque or parody, a kind in which the first rank is reached with difficulty. Persuasion, relatively faint in tone, and not enthralling in interest, has devotees who exalt above all the others its exquisite delicacy and keeping.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.