Pride and Prejudice

Pride and self-knowledge

The title names two faults, and the novel's cleverest move is refusing to give one to each lover. Darcy's pride is public from Chapter 3, where the neighbourhood decides he is “above his company, and above being pleased”. Elizabeth's pride is harder to see, because it is pride in her own judgement, and she recognises it only after reading his letter: “vanity, not love, has been my folly” (Chapter 36). Mary Bennet, the family bore, supplies the sharpest definition in Chapter 5: “Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” By that measure Darcy is proud and Elizabeth, stung by his remark at the ball, is vain. The most convincing reading is that the novel is less about getting rid of pride than about correcting it with knowledge. Darcy's confession in Chapter 58 that he was “given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit” blames an upbringing rather than a fixed nature, and his conduct at Pemberley shows the correction at work. A strong answer can push back: Darcy's letter defends most of what he did, and it is Elizabeth who has to re-read her whole history. “Till this moment, I never knew myself” is hers, not his, which suggests the novel's deepest change happens in its heroine.

First impressions and judgement

Austen's working title was First Impressions, and the plot is built as a test of them. Elizabeth judges Darcy on one overheard remark and Wickham on one pleasant evening, and she is wrong both times. The novel is careful to show that her mistake is not stupidity but a clever mind working for a wounded feeling: she admits in Chapter 5 that she could “easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine”. Wickham's story in Chapter 16 works because it confirms what she already wants to believe, and she never asks why a near-stranger is telling her something so private. Darcy's letter supplies what first impressions lack, which is evidence, and Elizabeth's response in Chapter 36 models good judgement. She first puts it away, protesting she “would never look in it again”, but then she “read, and re-read with the closest attention”, tries to “recollect some instance of goodness” in Wickham, finds none, and changes her mind. Jane is the useful contrast. She thinks ill of no one, and so she is “entirely deceived in Miss Bingley's regard” (Chapter 26) as surely as Elizabeth is deceived in Wickham. One reading is that the novel prefers Jane's charity to Elizabeth's cleverness; the stronger one is that it trusts neither without patience. Darcy's warning at the Netherfield ball, that Wickham's manners “ensure his making friends”, turns out to be exactly right, and it is the one thing Elizabeth will not hear.

Marriage and money

The first sentence makes a joke of marriage as a financial transaction, and the novel never lets the joke go. Mr Bennet's estate of “two thousand a year” is entailed away from his daughters, so marriage is the only secure future open to them, and every marriage in the book is measured against that fact. Charlotte Lucas sees it most clearly. To her, marriage is “the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune” (Chapter 22), and she accepts Mr Collins knowing exactly what he is. Elizabeth's verdict that Charlotte has “sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage” is harsh, and the novel lets us see that it is harsh: Charlotte is “twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome”, and has no money. The Bennets' own marriage shows the cost of choosing the other way, on looks alone, and Lydia's shows what happens when a couple are joined only because “their passions were stronger than their virtue” (Chapter 50). Against these the novel sets an ideal, described in the same chapter as “an union that must have been to the advantage of both”, in which each partner improves the other. Money is not removed from the ideal. Elizabeth's joke that her love dates from “his beautiful grounds at Pemberley” (Chapter 59) is funny because it is not entirely false. The best reading is that Austen wants love and prudence to agree, not to ask her heroine to choose between them.

Class and rank

The society of the novel is finely graded, and much of its comedy comes from people guarding their place in it. Darcy's first proposal asks whether Elizabeth could expect him “to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections” (Chapter 34). Lady Catherine asks whether “the shades of Pemberley” are “to be thus polluted” (Chapter 56). Mr Collins, her clergyman, praises her “affability and condescension” (Chapter 14) as if rudeness from the great were a gift. Elizabeth's answer to Lady Catherine is the novel's clearest statement on the subject: “He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal.” Notice how careful that claim is. Elizabeth does not reject rank; she claims her place within it. That is why one reading calls the novel conservative: it ends with a gentleman's daughter becoming mistress of a great estate and the order of things untouched. A more persuasive reading looks at who is honoured and who is exposed. Mr Gardiner, who lives “by trade, and within view of his own warehouses”, is “a sensible, gentleman-like man” (Chapter 25), and the last sentence of the novel records the Darcys' “warmest gratitude” to him and his wife. Lady Catherine, the highest-ranking character, is the rudest. Austen does not overturn class, but she insists that manners and conduct, not birth, decide who deserves respect.

Women and dependence

The novel rarely states its argument about women openly, but it is there in the arithmetic. The Bennet daughters cannot inherit Longbourn, which is entailed “in default of heirs male” (Chapter 7), and their father has saved nothing for them, a failure the narrator records in Chapter 50. A woman's education is designed to make her marriageable: Miss Bingley's list of what an accomplished woman needs, from music to “the modern languages”, is a catalogue of display, and Elizabeth's reply that she wonders at Darcy “knowing any” such women mocks the whole idea (Chapter 8). Her refusal of Mr Collins, in which she asks to be treated “as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart” (Chapter 19), is a claim to be heard as a person rather than acquired as a prize, and his refusal to believe her shows how little a woman's words were expected to mean. One reading makes Elizabeth a feminist heroine before her time. A more careful one notes that she escapes dependence by marrying the richest man in the book. Perhaps Austen's point is that a woman's independence in 1813 consisted largely in the right to refuse, which Elizabeth uses against Collins, Darcy and Lady Catherine, and that the right mattered precisely because refusing was so risky.

Family and responsibility

Parents in this novel are more often a danger than a protection. The business of Mrs Bennet's life, the narrator says in Chapter 1, is “to get her daughters married”, and Lydia is “a favourite with her mother, whose affection had brought her into public at an early age” (Chapter 9). Mr Bennet is cleverer and far funnier, but his wit is a way of not acting. When Elizabeth warns him that Lydia should not go to Brighton, he answers that she “will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public place or other” (Chapter 41), and lets her go. His remark to Elizabeth over Collins's letter in Chapter 57, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”, is the philosophy of a man who has turned his family into an entertainment. After the elopement he asks to “feel how much I have been to blame” (Chapter 48), but his remorse does not last. Lydia seems to feel nothing: her farewell letter to Mrs Forster laughs that it will be a “good joke” when she signs her name Lydia Wickham (Chapter 47). It is easy to make Lydia the villain of the crisis. The more convincing reading spreads the blame across Wickham's calculation, Mrs Bennet's indulgence and Mr Bennet's neglect. The rescue comes from outside the family, from Darcy and Mr Gardiner, which shows how far a family's reputation was shared: one daughter's disgrace would have fallen on all her sisters.

Three volumes and a hinge in the middle

The novel was first published in three volumes, of 23, 19 and 19 chapters. Some modern editions keep that numbering and others count straight through from 1 to 61, so check which your copy uses; this guide gives both. The turning point sits just past the centre, in Chapters 34 to 36, the middle of Volume II: the first proposal, the letter and Elizabeth’s self-reproach. Everything before it builds her misjudgement and everything after it takes that misjudgement apart. Volume III then opens with a new place and a new view of Darcy, at Pemberley.

Three proposals to Elizabeth

Elizabeth is proposed to three times, and the scenes answer one another. Mr Collins in Chapter 19 is a comic rehearsal: he cannot believe a refusal is meant. Darcy in Chapter 34 makes a serious version of the same mistake, and the narrator notes that he “had no doubt of a favourable answer”. In Chapter 58 Darcy himself names the fault, telling Elizabeth that he came to her at Hunsford “without a doubt of my reception”. The echo shows exactly what has changed: the second proposal is built on uncertainty and humility, and it succeeds because the first failed.

Letters that turn the plot

Letters carry the novel’s most important information, and each one has to be read and judged. Mr Collins’s letter in Chapter 13 introduces his pomposity before he arrives. Darcy’s letter in Chapter 35 overturns Elizabeth’s view of Wickham and of Darcy. Jane’s letters in Chapter 46 bring the news of Lydia, Lydia’s own note in Chapter 47 shows her thoughtlessness, and Mrs Gardiner’s letter in Chapter 52 reveals what Darcy has secretly done. Because the narrator usually withholds what other characters know, a letter is often the only way the truth reaches Elizabeth, and her readings of letters chart her growth as a judge of character.

Seeing through Elizabeth

The third-person narrator stays close to Elizabeth for most of the novel, so the reader shares her view and, for the first half, her mistakes: a first-time reader is likely to believe Wickham too. Austen allows a few glimpses of Darcy from the outside, and they create dramatic irony. As early as Chapter 6 we are told that he found her face “rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes”, so we know he is attracted long before she does. When the letter arrives, the reader has to re-read the first half alongside Elizabeth, which makes her discovery ours.

Marriages that mirror each other

The novel is organised around couples who act as foils. Jane and Bingley are an easy, open match nearly ruined by other people’s judgement. Charlotte and Mr Collins marry for security. Lydia and Wickham run off together, she on impulse and he to escape his debts, and are married only because someone pays. Mr and Mrs Bennet show what an unequal match becomes after twenty-three years (the figure is given in Chapter 1): the narrator says in Chapter 42 that he was “captivated by youth and beauty” and married a woman whose weak understanding soon ended “all real affection for her”. Elizabeth and Darcy are measured against all of these, which is why an essay on their marriage is stronger when it uses the others as evidence.

A comedy of manners in scenes

Much of the novel is told through dialogue in social set pieces: the Meryton assembly (Chapter 3), the evenings at Netherfield (Chapters 8 to 11), the Netherfield ball (Chapter 18), dinners at Rosings and visits in the drawing room. Character is revealed through how people talk, which is why the book adapts so readily to stage and screen. It is a comedy in the classical sense, ending in marriages, and the last chapter works as an epilogue that follows each character’s future. Its first sentence, about the day Mrs Bennet “got rid of her two most deserving daughters”, shows the irony holding firm to the end.

From First Impressions to Pride and Prejudice

Austen drafted the novel between October 1796 and August 1797 as First Impressions. Her father offered it to the London publisher Thomas Cadell in November 1797, and the offer was declined by return of post. She revised it heavily before Thomas Egerton, who paid her £110 for the copyright, published it on 28 January 1813, credited only as the work of the author of Sense and Sensibility. The change of title is worth an essay point. First Impressions names a plot about perception; Pride and Prejudice names two faults of character, and puts the moral weight on what the lovers must correct in themselves.

Places and movement

Each change of place brings a change of understanding. Hertfordshire, with Longbourn, Netherfield and Meryton, is where the first impressions are formed. Kent, at Hunsford parsonage and Rosings, brings the proposal and the letter, away from Elizabeth’s family. Derbyshire brings Pemberley, where she sees Darcy at home, and the inn at Lambton, where the news of Lydia reaches her. The return to Longbourn in the last volume tests whether what has been learned elsewhere can survive at home, among the people who made it so hard to learn.

Why it works

• It opens with an argument, not a summary. The claim that pride appears most clearly at the moment Darcy thinks he has overcome it gives the whole paragraph a direction.
• The quotations are short and embedded, and each is followed by analysis that names a method, reported speech, dashes or irony, and explains its effect.
• It links the extract to the rest of the novel through a precise verbal echo, consequence in Chapters 3 and 34, which is more convincing than a vague gesture back to the start of the book.
• Context is woven into the argument: rank and connections explain why Darcy thinks as he does, and Lady Catherine is used as evidence rather than as a history lesson.
• It turns the argument to show that Elizabeth is proud too, which addresses the title and the whole text, and it ends on an interpretation rather than a restatement.