Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is a comedy about how people misjudge each other, and the way to study it is to track how Elizabeth Bennet's first impressions are formed, overturned and rebuilt across its three volumes. This study guide covers the novel's structure, its main themes and characters, a reading plan, and the questions to bring to a seminar or an essay.

Jane Austen drafted the novel in 1796 and 1797 as First Impressions, revised it, and published it in January 1813 as Pride and Prejudice, without her name, credited to the author of Sense and Sensibility. It is a novel of manners: a comedy about a gentry family in rural Hertfordshire, the Bennets, whose five daughters need to marry well because the family estate, Longbourn, will pass to a male cousin when Mr. Bennet dies.

It follows Elizabeth, the second daughter, and her slow recognition that her low opinion of the wealthy Mr. Darcy is wrong, alongside his recognition that his pride has been just as blind. It is read today for its comic dialogue and ironic narrator, and because beneath the courtship plot it is exact about money, rank and the narrow choices open to women without fortunes. Its opening sentence, about a single man in possession of a good fortune, is among the most quoted in English fiction.