Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen began writing the novel which later became Pride and Prejudice in October of 1796 and finished it by August of the following year; she was then twenty-one years old. Little is known of this early version of the story beyond its original title: First Impressions. No copy of that original is known to exist. Three months after Miss Austen completed work on the book, her father offered it to a publisher in the hope that it would make it into print. The publisher refused without ever having seen the manuscript.
Fortunately for all of her admirers, whether Austen was discouraged or not by her first rejection, she continued to write; though, it was not until the winter of 1811, fully fourteen years after finishing First Impressions, that she again picked up that manuscript and began revising it into the version we know today as Pride and Prejudice. This occurred in the wake of her first publishing success--the publication of Sense and Sensibility on 30 October 1811. Pride and Prejudice was far more fortunate than its earlier incarnation; it was accepted for publication and was presented to the world on 28 January 1813.
Jane Austen's name was never attached to any of her published novels during her lifetime, and the title page of Pride and Prejudice read only:
BY THE AUTHOR OF "SENSE AND SENSIBILITY."
In a remote Hertfordshire village, far off the good coach roads of George III's England, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet -- a country squire of no great means and his scatterbrained wife -- must marry off their five vivacious daughters. At the heart of this all-consuming enterprise are the headstrong second daughter Elizabeth and her aristocratic suitor Fitzwilliam Darcy, two lovers in whom pride and prejudice must be overcome before love can bring the novel to its magnificent conclusion.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the "most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author's works," and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as "irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be."
"The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste."
--Virginia Woolf(less)
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