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Summary
Summary
The provincial Bennet family, home to five unmarried daughters, is turned upside down when a wealthy bachelor takes up a house nearby. Mr. Bingley enhances his instant popularity by hosting a ball and taking an interest in the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane. Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy, Bingley's even wealthier friend, makes himself equally unpopular by his aloof disdain of country manners. Yet he is drawn in spite of himself to the spirited and intelligent Elizabeth Bennet, who proves to be his match in both wit and pride. Their sparkling repartee is a splendid performance of civilized sparring infused with unacknowledged romantic tension. Pride and Prejudice delightfully captures the affectations and rivalries of class-conscious English families in an age when status and security for women hung entirely on matrimonial ambitions. Austen's characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England. It is also the source of some of the most memorable characters ever written, from the fatuous Mr. Collins, whose proposal to Elizabeth is one of the finest comic passages in English literature, to the beloved heroine Elizabeth, whom the author herself deemed "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print."
Author Notes
Jane Austen's life is striking for the contrast between the great works she wrote in secret and the outward appearance of being quite dull and ordinary. Austen was born in the small English town of Steventon in Hampshire, and educated at home by her clergyman father. She was deeply devoted to her family. For a short time, the Austens lived in the resort city of Bath, but when her father died, they returned to Steventon, where Austen lived until her death at the age of 41.
Austen was drawn to literature early, she began writing novels that satirized both the writers and the manners of the 1790's. Her sharp sense of humor and keen eye for the ridiculous in human behavior gave her works lasting appeal. She is at her best in such books as Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), in which she examines and often ridicules the behavior of small groups of middle-class characters. Austen relies heavily on conversations among her characters to reveal their personalities, and at times her novels read almost like plays. Several of them have, in fact, been made into films. She is considered to be one of the most beloved British authors.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Collagist Fabe adds flair to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with 39 original illustrations that accompany the unabridged text. Fabe's collages overlay bright, watercolor-washed scenes with retro cut-paper figures and objects sampled from fashion magazines from the 1930s to the '50s. Accompanying each tableau is a quote from the Pride and Prejudice passage that inspired it. Like Austen's book, Fabe's work explores arcane customs of beauty and courtship, pageantry and social artifice: in one collage, a housewife holds a tray of drinks while a man sits happily with a sandwich in hand in the distance. While tinged with irony and more than a dash of social commentary, the collages nevertheless have a spirit of glee and evidence deep reverence for the novel. As Fabe describes in a preface, Austen "was a little bit mean-the way real people are mean-so there are both heroes and nincompoops. Family is both beloved and annoying. That is Austen's genius, her ability to describe people in all their frailty and humor." This is a sweet and visually appealing homage. (BookLife) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Carol Howard's Introduction to Pride and Prejudice It is sometimes said that Austen's gift was to be a shrewd observer of her narrow, genteel social circle, that her experience and knowledge of the world were limited and her life sheltered, and that her novels realistically reflect the peaceful late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century village community and English countryside she inhabited. That Austen was a careful observer of human motivation and social interaction is certainly true. One should not assume, though, that her choice to write novels of manners means that she was unaware of or unaffected by the political and social upheaval of her day. The idea that she centers her novels on the social classes with which she was most familiar is not entirely the case, although she had occasion to observe members of the gentry and aristocracy whose circumstances resembled those of some of the characters who populate her novels. Whether her own life was perfectly serene is questionable: Most lives, no matter how uneventful in retrospect, have their vicissitudes. At the very least, Austen and her family must have had concerns over the tumultuous historical events that unsettled the British nation during their lifetime. She was born in 1775, the year that marked the beginning of the American Revolution. Several decades later, she would read newspaper accounts of another British conflict with the new American nation in the War of 1812, which began as she finished revising Pride and Prejudice . What must have played significantly in Austen's imagination, as in the mind of every Briton, was the ongoing war with Napoleon's forces, which marked the culmination of a century of conflicts between Britain and France, and which ended, with the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, six months before her fortieth birthday. The British fear of invasion by Napoleon, which endured until 1805, caused concern even in the towns and villages that seemed safest. Austen would have been aware of the billeting of British militia troops in the English countryside, and she certainly followed the career of her brother Henry, who had joined the Oxford militia in 1793, when Britain's latest war with France erupted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. She must also have taken a personal interest in the campaigns of the British navy, which counted her brothers Francis and Charles among its officers. To what extent she cared about daily political events is difficult to discern, for her letters are marked by characteristic irony. Of a newspaper report of an 1811 battle of the Peninsular War, when Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal in an effort to close ports to British commerce, Austen declared, "How horrible it is to have so many people killed!--And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!" (Le Faye, Jane Austen's Letters ). Excerpted from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.