Pride and Prejudice — Commentary

In brief

Five unmarried daughters, an estate entailed away from them, and a rich young man taking the house next door: Austen sets up the oldest plot in comedy and then spends three hundred pages turning it inside out. The marriage plot is the frame, but the subject is judgement, how people form opinions of each other, how quickly they do it, and what it costs to change them. Elizabeth Bennet is the most intelligent person in most rooms she enters, and the novel’s great achievement is to make that intelligence the cause of her worst mistake.

It is also very funny. Mrs Bennet’s nerves, Mr Collins’s letters and Lady Catherine’s interrogations are among the best comic writing in English, and the comedy is never decoration: each fool is a version of a fault the heroine has too.

The argument

The title sounds like a division of labour: Darcy is the proud one and Elizabeth the prejudiced one. The book does not let that stand. Darcy’s pride produces a prejudice, against her family, her connections and the manners of Meryton. Elizabeth’s prejudice comes from a pride of her own, pride in her quickness, her wit and her sense that she sees through people. Both faults live in both of them. The phrase itself was borrowed: Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782) ends with a speech putting all the trouble down to “PRIDE and PREJUDICE”, in capitals.

What the novel argues for is not the triumph of feeling over reason or of love over money, but a particular kind of honesty: holding your first impression up against the evidence, and being willing to be humbled by the result. Elizabeth’s turning point is not falling in love. It is the moment, alone on a walk with Darcy’s letter, when she sees that her vanity has been reading the world for her. “Till this moment, I never knew myself” (ch. 36). Love follows later, and slowly, and is built on that recognition.

Darcy has his own version, which readers often forget because it happens off stage. In ch. 58 he confesses that he was “a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle”, brought up to good rules but allowed to follow them in pride and conceit. Her refusal taught him what he had never been taught. The marriage at the end is between two people who have each been corrected by the other, which is why it convinces where most fictional marriages merely end the book.

The shape of the book

The novel was published in three volumes, and the structure still shows. Volume I (ch. 1–23) gathers everyone in Hertfordshire and sets every misjudgement in motion: Darcy’s insult at the assembly, Wickham’s story, Bingley’s departure, Charlotte’s engagement. Volume II (ch. 24–42) moves Elizabeth to Kent and puts the two great scenes at its centre: the first proposal (ch. 34) and the letter (ch. 35). Volume III (ch. 43–61) takes her to Pemberley and tests the new knowledge with a crisis, Lydia’s elopement, that can only be solved by the man she refused.

The hinge of the whole book is a document. Darcy’s letter does in a few pages what dialogue cannot: it puts the evidence in front of Elizabeth when he is not there to argue with, and lets her reread it. Austen shows her doing exactly that, first rejecting it, then weighing it sentence by sentence against what she remembers. It is one of the first great scenes in fiction of someone changing her mind by reading.

The plot is also built in pairs. Jane and Bingley are a softer copy of Elizabeth and Darcy, kind people almost parted because neither will assert anything. Lydia and Wickham are the dark copy: attraction with no judgement at all. Charlotte and Collins are the sensible copy, marriage with judgement and no attraction. Mr and Mrs Bennet stand behind them all as the warning of what happens when a clever man marries a pretty fool and then retreats into irony.

The voice

The first sentence is the most quoted in the English novel and one of the most misread. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (ch. 1). The truth is not universal; it is what the mothers of Meryton believe. And the want is not the man’s: it is the neighbourhood that wants him, as property for its daughters. The sentence announces a narrator who says one thing and means another, and trusts the reader to hear both.

Austen did not invent free indirect style, the narration that slips into a character’s own words and thoughts without quotation marks; Burney, Richardson and Goethe all used it before her. What she did was make it the instrument of the whole book. For long stretches we see Darcy through Elizabeth’s eyes and in her vocabulary, so her prejudice becomes ours. When she finds out she was wrong, most first-time readers find out at the same moment. The trick is the novel’s moral in miniature: we are made to commit her error so that we can learn her lesson.

The rest is dialogue, and Austen’s dialogue does more work than any other novelist’s of her time. Characters reveal themselves in how they talk: Collins in pompous periods, Lady Catherine in questions that are orders, Mr Bennet in sarcasm that excuses him from acting, Elizabeth in a lightness that is also a defence. The sparring between Elizabeth and Darcy at Netherfield (ch. 11) is a courtship conducted entirely through argument about character.

Money

Austen is exact about money, and the book makes no sense without it. Darcy has ten thousand a year and Bingley four or five. Mr Bennet has about two thousand, but Longbourn is entailed on the male line and passes at his death to his cousin Mr Collins. Each daughter can expect one thousand pounds, and Collins coolly reminds Elizabeth that hers sits in the four per cents, about forty pounds a year, and will not be hers until her mother dies (ch. 19). A gentlewoman could not earn, inherit land or keep her own property once married. Marriage was not a romantic choice laid on top of an economic one; it was the economy.

That is why Charlotte Lucas is the book’s most important minor character. At twenty-seven, plain and without money, she accepts Collins within days of Elizabeth refusing him, and tells her friend plainly: “I am not romantic, you know” (ch. 22). Elizabeth is shocked, and the narrator lets us see that Charlotte is not wrong. Her choice gives her a house, a position and a sitting room her husband rarely enters. Elizabeth’s refusals of Collins and then of Darcy are brave precisely because Charlotte shows what refusal risks.

Money also settles the crisis. Wickham will only marry Lydia if paid, and the Bennets assume her uncle Gardiner has paid. In fact Darcy has, quietly, and asked that no one be told (ch. 52). His wealth, the thing that made him insufferable, is redeemed by being spent on her family without credit. And Elizabeth’s famous joke that she first loved him on seeing “his beautiful grounds at Pemberley” (ch. 59) is a joke because it is partly true: Pemberley showed her what kind of master he was, from the taste of the house to the housekeeper’s praise (ch. 43).

The people

Elizabeth Bennet

Austen wrote to her sister that she thought Elizabeth “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print”. She is witty, loyal, brave in front of rank, and wrong about the two men who matter most. Her charm and her error come from one source: she reads people quickly and trusts her reading. The novel loves her and does not spare her.

Fitzwilliam Darcy

Not a brooding romantic hero but a shy, rigid man of strong principle and poor manners, who mistakes his reserve for superiority. His first proposal is a masterpiece of tactlessness: he tells her at length why he should not love her. The second time he simply asks. Everything he does in Volume III is done without hope of reward, which is how we know he has changed.

Mr and Mrs Bennet

Mrs Bennet is ridiculous, but her panic is rational: if her husband dies, she and five daughters lose their home. Mr Bennet is the better company and the worse parent. Austen makes his failure explicit in ch. 42: he married for looks, found nothing behind them, and settled into mocking his wife instead of guiding his children. Lydia’s ruin is his doing as much as hers.

Wickham, Collins and Lady Catherine

Three studies in false surfaces. Wickham has all the manners and none of the principle; Collins has neither, only a hunger for patronage; Lady Catherine has rank and uses it to bully. When she drives to Longbourn to forbid the marriage (ch. 56), Elizabeth’s reply, that she is a gentleman’s daughter and so his equal, is the novel’s political high point, and Lady Catherine’s interference is what tells Darcy he may hope again.

What lies outside

The book is often called a world of drawing rooms untouched by history, but history keeps walking through it. The militia quartered in Meryton, the officers the younger Bennets chase and the camp at Brighton belong to a country at war with France. Clergy like Collins depend on patrons like Lady Catherine; fortunes like Bingley’s come from trade in the north that the Bingley sisters would rather forget. Austen keeps all this at the edge of the frame, but the edge is drawn precisely. Her narrowness is a choice of focus, not ignorance: she wrote about what she could render truthfully.

How it was made

Austen drafted the novel in 1796–97, in her early twenties, under the title First Impressions. Her father offered it to the publisher Thomas Cadell, who declined it without reading it. She revised it heavily around 1811–12, probably cutting it hard, and sold the copyright to Thomas Egerton for £110. It appeared anonymously on 28 January 1813, “by the author of Sense and Sensibility”. She called it her “own darling child”, and worried, half seriously, that it was “rather too light, and bright, and sparkling” and wanted some shade.

Readers and critics

Early readers enjoyed it as a clever novel of manners. Walter Scott, after rereading it, praised her talent for “the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life” as finer than his own “big bow-wow strain”. Charlotte Brontë was famously unmoved, finding in it “a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden” with no open country and no passion. Mark Twain claimed he wanted to dig her up and beat her with her own shin-bone, which is its own sort of tribute.

Modern criticism has made her harder and darker. D. W. Harding’s essay “Regulated Hatred” (1940) argued that her comedy is a way of surviving people she despised. Feminist critics have read the book as a precise account of women’s dependence, and Elizabeth’s refusals as acts of real defiance. Marxist and historical critics have read Pemberley as a fantasy of the good landlord at a time when landed power was under strain. All of these readings fit, which is a sign of how much the book holds.

Afterlives

Few novels have been retold as often. The 1940 film with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, the 1995 BBC series with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, and Joe Wright’s 2005 film with Keira Knightley each define the story for a generation. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) moved it to London; Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) to Amritsar; P. D. James continued it as a murder mystery in Death Comes to Pemberley (2011); and Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013) tells it from the servants’ hall, where someone has to wash the muddy petticoats Elizabeth wore to Netherfield.

The “enemies to lovers” romance owes it a great deal, but the debt usually runs one way: most imitations keep the antagonism and the attraction and drop the self-knowledge, which was Austen’s point.

How to read it

Read the first sentence of each chapter twice. Austen often puts the irony there, and it sets the angle for what follows.
Trust no first impression, including your own. On a first reading, note what you think of Darcy and Wickham at the end of Volume I, then compare.
Read chapters 34 to 36 in one sitting. Proposal, letter and recognition are one movement, and the best sequence in the book.
Listen to how people speak. Every character is defined by voice; the narrator rarely has to tell you what to think of anyone.
Watch the minor marriages. Charlotte, Lydia, the Bennets and the Gardiners are the arguments against which Elizabeth’s choice is measured.

Emma (1815). Austen’s other heroine who misreads everyone, written with even greater control and less sympathy.
Persuasion (1817). The reverse story: a woman who listened to good advice and lived to regret it. Older, quieter and sadder.
Fanny Burney, Cecilia (1782). The novel Austen took her title from, and a picture of the world she was writing against.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72). Austen’s provincial realism widened to a whole town, with marriages that go wrong for the same reasons.
Jo Baker, Longbourn (2013). The same house and the same events, seen from below stairs.