9781570421143

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Of all Jane Austen's books, Pride and Prejudice has earned a special place in the hearts of the reading public as her best-loved and most intimately known novel. From its famous opening sentence the story of the Bennet family and of the novel's two protagonists, Elizabeth and Darcy, told with a wit that its author feared might prove 'rather too light and bright, and sparkling', delights its most familiar readers as thoroughly as it does those who encounter it for the first time. Jane Austen's artistry is apparent, too, in the delineation of the minor characters: the ill-matched Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Charles Bingley and his sisters, and above all the fatuous Mr. Collins, whose proposal to Elizabeth Bennet is one of the finest comic passages in English literature. And while she entertains us, Jane Austen teaches us the wisdom of balance, the folly of 'pride' and 'prejudice'.

"Arrange the great English novelists as one will, it does not seem possible to bring them out in any order where she is not the first, or second or third, whoever her companions may be....A little aloof, a little inscrutable and mysterious, she will always remain, but serene and beautiful also because of her greatness as an artist."

Virginia Woolf, Times Literary Supplement, 05/08/1913

"She thought an unattached young woman with intelligence...was the most marvelous creature in the world...What must have made this type so appealing to her, of course, was that this was the only time in their lives in which women like that had an absolute power--if only the power to withhold themselves--over the desires of a man. Austen felt keenly the fragility of the circumstance...This is what makes the scene of Darcy's first proposal so potent: Elizabeth will never experience again so fine an emotional surge as she does when she spurns him. It is the one context in which she is permitted to say exactly what she feels."

MGM promotion of the 1940 film of the novel

A Study Guide to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: Search Results