The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

Pride and Prejudice was written by Jane Austen and was published in 1813. Austen (1775-1817) is generally regarded as one of the greatest of English novelists. Her best novels, like Pride and Prejudice and Emma, are a part of the Canon of great literature, and she remains one of the most popular authors in the world.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners (a novel about the manners and customs of a particular group of people in a particular time and place) about Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter (one of five) of a country gentleman, Mr. Bennet. The Bennets face a difficulty: although they are currently of middle-class status, their estate is entailed—it can only legally pass to a male heir, which Mr. Bennet does not have—so that if he dies, the estate will pass out of the hands of the Bennets and into the hands of the pompous and clueless Mr. Collins, who will in all likelihood not support the surviving Bennets. This prospect, of financial ruin and homelessness, is a quite serious one for the Bennets, and to counter it the daughters must make good matches in their marriage—a difficulty, as there are few suitable men in Meryton, the town near which the Bennets live. (There are troops camped nearby, the officers of which the younger Bennet sisters flirt with, but those flirtations are not considered serious.)

Thus the news of the arrival of Mr. Bingley, a wealthy bachelor, into the neighborhood is a welcome one, not least to Mrs. Bennet, who is obsessed to an unpleasant degree with marrying her daughters off. Bingley’s apparent attraction to Jane Bennet—an attraction equally felt by her—seems to hint that a marriage will soon be in the works. Unfortunately for Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Bingley’s best friend is Mr. Darcy, a proud, stiff, awkward and haughty man who initially treats Elizabeth in a rude manner, arousing her dislike for him. By contrast Elizabeth befriends George Wickham, a military officer who confesses to having been treated badly in the past by Mr. Darcy, and when Bingley abruptly returns to London without having proposed to Jane, and Elizabeth becomes convinced that Mr. Darcy was responsible for Bingley severing the budding relationship, her dislike for him deepens.

Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth, who declines him, and he marries Elizabeth’s best friend, the homely and aging (but wealthy) Charlotte Lucas. Elizabeth then begins to find out more about Mr. Darcy, discovering that Wickham is a scoundrel (a discovery confirmed when Wickham runs away with Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia) and that he once tried to elope with Darcy’s younger sister Georgiana when she was only fifteen. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, who declines him, but after a letter from him explaining his actions, and after Darcy forces Wickham to marry Lydia, Elizabeth realizes that Darcy has a good soul and accepts his proposal. Bingley realizes that Jane loves him and marries her after all, and there is a happy ending for the Bennet sisters.

Pride and Prejudice’s place in history is secure; it is the most popular of Austen’s novels with readers, is highly rated by critics, and is arguably the most influential of her novels. In reader polls Pride and Prejudice is routinely rated as one of the two or three most popular in the world. The critical apparatus around the novel, as with Emma, continues to grow despite the novel’s age, as critics continually find things to write about. As the mother of all romance novels—Germaine Greer wrote that “Pride and Prejudice is the matrix on which all Harlequin romances are built. It’s the best selling plot line in literature”—Pride and Prejudice can claim to have had as much influence as any other single novel in existence. And Pride and Prejudice is also one of the strongest early feminist novels.

Pride and Prejudice is usually described as a comedy. This is true, so far as it goes, but where Emma can be described as a serious novel with comic overtones. Pride and Prejudice is a comic novel with serious undertones. Austen meant the novel to be playful, “light and bright and sparkling” in her own words, and thought that it “lacks shade”—and indeed the novel is a bit of a fairy tale, between its stereotypically English setting and its happy endings and contrived resolutions to very real problems—but the final impression one gets from Pride and Prejudice is that the novel’s comedy has bite and is accompanied by very serious and very real matters, matters more fitting to a drama than a comedy.

Too, despite being a comedy the novel is an outspokenly feminist novel. Despite her own words regarding Pride and Prejudice, and despite Austen’s general political and social conservatism, Austen infused Pride and Prejudice with a significant amount of feminism. Charlotte Lucas’ sadly wise words regarding her marriage to Mr. Collins—“I am not romantic you know. I never was. I ask only for a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’ character, connections, and situations in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair, as most people can boast on entering the marriage state”—are a moving damning of the position of women and marriage in Austen’s era. As well, in its criticism of the system of entailment (in which only male heirs can inherit ownership of an estate) Pride and Prejudice strikes a strong feminist note against a fundamentally sexist system. Similarly, Elizabeth’s insistence that she is the equal of Mr. Darcy—“He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal”—is feminism in its purest form.

Elizabeth’s mother, Mrs. Bennet, is a part of the novel’s comedy, and she is roughly analogous to Miss Bates, in Emma, but where Miss Bates succeeds in being a comic and irritating figure—albeit not without a pathos of her own, as Mr. Knightley famously points out to Emma—Mrs. Bennet is cringe-inducing—and, I think, deliberately so on Austen’s part. There is comedy in Mrs. Bennet’s grasping, marriage-obsessed character and her gauche behavior and lack of decorum, and she constantly verges on becoming a caricature, but she is also a constant reminder to Elizabeth about what a failure as a mother and as a wife looks like. Pride and Prejudice, in fact, is—despite its happy endings—deeply cynical about marriage, with a variety of bad marriages, real and potential, being visible throughout the novel, and the happy unions at the novel’s ending being in their way as unconvincing as the ending of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Mr. and Mrs. Bennets’ marriage is a deeply unhappy one, but it is rarely portrayed in comic terms, instead being shown in serious and realistic ones, in ways that most readers of any time and place can recognize as being deeply painful (rather than amusing) to Mr. Bennet, to Elizabeth, and even to Mrs. Bennet, self- deluded though she is.

Pride and Prejudice was Austen’s second novel and is the first real “Jane Austen” novel, the first to successfully merge Austen’s wit and comic sense with her trademark irony and serious concerns. Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s first novel, has what one Austen biographer called a “wobble in its approach,” an authorial indecision about whether sense or sensibility should triumph and a disappointing authorial choice about the marriage of Marianne Dashwood. There is no such wobble or disappointment to be found in Pride and Prejudice; Austen skillfully combines the comic and the serious to superlative effect. Too, Pride and Prejudice, unlike the later Emma, is located chronologically, in real time and in a relatively real place; the timeless idyll of Highbury, in Emma, is replaced with the backdrop of the Napoleonic War and the presence of the troops and their effect on Meryton, the nearest village to Elizabeth’s home. And unlike Sense and Sensibility and the later Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice is not a didactic novel; the moralism of Pride and Prejudice, the intended lessons to be learned—the preferred inscribed narrative—are much more skillfully and naturally woven into the weft of the novel.

Surprisingly, Pride and Prejudice has a stronger and more complicated plot than Emma, though plot is not Austen’s strong suit, and is far more re-readable than Emma, thanks to Austen’s epigrammatic style. Pride and Prejudice is in fact an interesting comparison to Emma, in that Emma is usually thought of as the better novel but Pride and Prejudice is far and away the more popular of the two. Critically there is little comparison between the two, as critics almost universally see Emma as the stronger of the two; but the average reader of Austen almost universally favors Pride and Prejudice—and always has, from when Pride and Prejudice was first published. (Pride and Prejudice was critically popular on its initial publication but was far more popular with the average reader—a case that still holds today.) Why readers prefer Pride and Prejudice is after all not a deep mystery, but the reasons deserve explication.

Pride and Prejudice has what passes for villains in an Austen novel: the odious George Wickham, the snobbish Miss Bingley, the pompous Mr. Collins, and the haughty Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who does what she can to foil the marriage between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth. Emma had no villains. Novels are always more enjoyable when the heroes have proper villains to set themselves against, and the actions of the villains in Pride and Prejudice give the plot a great deal of its forward momentum.

Pride and Prejudice is a bitchier novel than Emma. There is far more of Austen’s epigrammatic wit in Pride and Prejudice than in Emma, beginning with the novel’s famous first line, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” But the dialogue in Pride and Prejudice is generally spikier than Emma, reflecting the tendency of the era to put the action sequences in the dialogue itself. Just as Pride and Prejudice has villains where Emma has none, Pride and Prejudice has conflict, reflected in and generated by the dialogue, where Emma simply has plot complications.

Pride and Prejudice has the more likable characters of the two novels. Austen famously said of Emma Woodhouse that “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” which is perhaps a slight over-exaggeration, but not too much of one. There remains an ambiguity about Emma even by the end of the novel. But few readers dislike Elizabeth Bennett, whose main flaw is not Emma’s vanity but a more identifiable quickness to judge—the “prejudice” of the novel’s title. (Contrasted with the “pride” of Mr. Darcy—features both Elizabeth and Darcy set aside by novel’s end.) Emma’s father is a subject of comedy, while Elizabeth’s father is ultimately a tragic figure, hiding his disappointment at a marriage-gone-wrong behind his ever-present wit. And Mr. Knightley, while an honorable man, lacks the three dimensions and the Gothic Hero-Villain appeal of Mr. Darcy. Similarly, where Emma has as secondary characters people like Miss Bates, Pride and Prejudice has Elizabeth’s sisters.

Pride and Prejudice is the more relatable of the two novels. Emma has no problems, being young, beautiful, wealthy, and privileged; her main difficulty is having too little to do. The problems of Elizabeth, conversely, are quite recognizable: money problems, family problems, relationship problems. These are universal problems, recognizable by men and women across time and cultures, rather than the more limited problems—limited socioeconomically and chronologically—of Emma. The reader ends up liking Emma despite her elevated condition and her lack of real problems; the reader almost immediately recognizes Elizabeth and identifies with her.

The stakes are much higher in Pride and Prejudice than in Emma. Emma is after all wealthy and privileged in her position in Highbury, a situation which is not going to change if she fails to win the love of the right man. She will still have the friendship of Mr. Knightley, still be the social queen of Highbury, and still have her father’s (quite heavy) love. But Elizabeth and her sisters are in a financially precarious situation, with only their father’s life being between them and financial ruin. Elizabeth is still young, but in her friend Charlotte Lucas the reader gets a (shudder-inducing) glimpse at what life for a spinster (at only age 27!) would be like, and the sorts of loveless marriage Elizabeth might be forced in to if she wanted to avoid being a burden to her family. Emma only need fear being a spinster; Elizabeth has to worry about the family ultimately being homeless.

Lastly, Emma is a kind of idyll, with Highbury being a kind of pastoral paradise for its inhabitants. Real world considerations do not intrude upon it, nor do the characters face real world problems. The world of Pride and Prejudice is quite different, despite its fairy tale structure, and Austen even allows sex to appear—never explicitly stated, true, but the storyline about Lydia bringing social disrepute upon her family and being shamed is all about Lydia having sex before marriage and the world knowing about it. Moreover, Lydia’s reaction to her elopement with Mr. Wickham, and her blithe lack of understanding for the shame she has brought to the Bennets, indicates that Austen, despite (probably) being a virgin herself, had a clear understanding that woman can actually enjoy sex rather than seeing it as a mere onerous experience to be suffered through.

The appeal of Pride and Prejudice to readers is obvious: a pleasingly ironic narration, witty dialogue, likable characters, a romantic relationship that is realistic in its slow and steady attraction between the two characters, and real problems. It is no surprise that modern polls of readers show that Pride and Prejudice is regularly ranked in the top three best books ever written. In fact, it is a sign of Austen’s strength as a writer that the novel is as popular as it is with readers despite its flaws. As mentioned, the dialogue is spiked, and bristling with sharp exchanges and ill- will buried beneath a veneer of politesse; this makes the novel an entertaining read but hardly a smooth one. Too, unlike Emma, there are a significant number of dated, antiquated, or obscure terms used in Pride and Prejudice and a reliance on a knowledge of contemporary social distinctions; the use of explanatory notes, annotations, and scholarly commentary is advised when reading Pride and Prejudice, unlike with Emma. Lastly, the characters of Pride and Prejudice are more carefully described than the ones in Emma, made more three- dimensional by Austen, but this consequently leads to their flaws and oddities being more pronounced. As critic Harold Bloom put it, Pride and Prejudice has a “social world that borders oddly on the bizarre, for everyone in it is rather more idiosyncratic than at first they appear to be”—a critical judgment that not all readers will share but which will strike some readers as forcefully accurate.

Part of the comic material of Pride and Prejudice can be seen as overstaying its welcome. Miss Bates, in Emma, is intended to be funny, but Austen overdid the degree to which the reader is exposed to Miss Bates and her blather, with the result that what was intended to be funny actually becomes irritating and skippable. Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is similarly intended to be funny, but whether deliberately or by accident Austen reigned herself in and limited the amount of Mrs. Bennet’s comic stylings. Mrs. Bennet actually makes the superior comic foil to Miss Bates, as the comedy in Mrs. Bennet is both more realistic—one can more easily imagine Mrs. Bennet existing and saying the things she does than Miss Bates—and less comic and more cringe-inducing— the difference, perhaps, between the American sense of humor and the British sense of humor.

Even with these flaws, however—flaws which are after all relatively small—Pride and Prejudice is quite understandably one of the most popular novels in the world, one read and reread both popularly and critically with pleasure.

Recommended Edition

Print: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2004.

Online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=dul1.ark:/13960/t33216529&view=1up&seq=9&skin=2021

For Further Research

Bloom, Harold. “Bloom on Pride and Prejudice.” Pride and Prejudice (Chelsea House, 2004).

Brower, Reuben. Light and Bright and Sparkling: Irony and Fiction in Pride and Prejudice (1963).

Jones, Darryl. “Pride and Prejudice.” Pride and Prejudice, Updated Edition (Bloom’s Modern Critical Editions, 2004).

Kordich, Catherine. “Pride and Prejudice.” Bloom’s How to Write About Jane Austen (Chelsea House, 2008).

Stafford, Fiona. “Introduction.” Pride and Prejudice (Oxford World’s Classics, 2004).

Sweets, Sparky. “Pride & Prejudice—Book Summary & Analysis.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nm61IoNdHg