Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the most loved of her six novels — a comedy of manners that doubles as one of the great moral educations in English fiction. In a small Hertfordshire village, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy meet, misread each other almost completely, and over the course of a year discover, through humiliation and re-reading, what each is really like. The wit is the surface; the seriousness is the foundation.

This is the novel that gave the English language Mr. Bennet's exhaustion and Mrs. Bennet's nerves, Mr. Collins's letters and Lady Catherine de Bourgh's drawing-room, the Netherfield ball and Pemberley in summer light, and the line every reader knows by heart: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. It is also the novel in which Austen perfected free indirect style — the technique that would make her, by way of George Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, the most influential English novelist of the nineteenth century.

Read for plot, Pride and Prejudice is a courtship: five unmarried daughters, an entailed estate, two eligible men from the north of England. Read more carefully, it is a study of how two intelligent people grow up — how pride hardens into a wall, how prejudice mistakes itself for perception, and how both, in the right hands, can be broken open without sentimentality.

This edition presents the complete text of the 1813 novel in a clean, readable typesetting designed for modern e-readers, with chapter numbers as Austen wrote them, an editor's foreword tracing the book from its 1796 first draft (under the title First Impressions) to its publication sixteen years later, an extended note on Austen's life and afterlife, fiction-specific discussion questions for reading groups, a curated guide to further reading, and a chapter-by-chapter Reader's Companion designed to accompany a first reading or a return.