Pride and Prejudice
Two hundred years old and it still has the best meet-cute in literary history. Austen was wickedly funny and she never let anyone forget it.
Wit and Wanting
Jane Austen's 1813 masterpiece follows Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five sisters in a genteel English family anxious to marry off its daughters, as she navigates the arrival of wealthy Mr. Bingley and his infuriatingly proud friend Mr. Darcy. What begins as mutual disdain becomes one of literature's greatest romances. Austen's razor-sharp social satire skewers the marriage market, class hypocrisy, and the absurdity of a world where a woman's future depended entirely on whom she married. The novel has never been out of print since publication.
Reading Pride and Prejudice
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"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
"Jane Austen · Pride and Prejudice
Austen originally titled the novel First Impressions and completed a draft in 1797. Her father tried to get it published and was rejected. It sat in a drawer for sixteen years before appearing as Pride and Prejudice.
The title was borrowed from a phrase in Fanny Burney's Cecilia. The novel has inspired over 200 adaptations and spin-offs including Bridget Jones's Diary, which retells it in 1990s London.