Pride And Prejudice By Jane Austen Unabridged 1813 First Edition Original

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story charts the emotional development of the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, who learns the error of making hasty judgements and comes to appreciate the difference between the superficial and the essential. The comedy of the writing lies in the depiction of manners, education, and marriage and money in the British Regency.

Elizabeth Bennet's early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy is a prejudice only matched by his arrogant pride.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story charts the emotional development of the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, who learns the error of making hasty judgements and comes to appreciate the difference between the superficial and the essential. The comedy of the writing lies in the depiction of manners, education, and marriage and money in the British Regency.Mr Bennet of the Longbourn estate has five daughters, but his property is entailed, meaning that none of the girls can inherit it. Since his wife had no fortune, it is imperative that one of the girls marries well in order to support the others on his death. However, Jane Austen's opening line 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife' is a sentence filled with irony and playfulness. The novel revolves around the necessity of marrying for love, not simply for mercenary reasons despite the social pressures to make a good (i.e. wealthy) match.PLOT:The novel opens with Mrs Bennet trying to persuade Mr Bennet to visit an eligible bachelor, Mr Bingley, who has arrived in the neighborhood. After some verbal sparring with Mr Bennet baiting his wife, it transpires that this visit has taken place at Netherfield (Mr Bingley's rented house). The visit is followed by an invitation to a ball at the local assembly rooms that the whole neighborhood will attend.At the ball, Mr Bingley is open and cheerful, popular with all the guests, and appears to be very attracted to the beautiful Miss Jane Bennet. His friend, Mr Darcy, is reputed to be twice as wealthy; however, he is haughty and aloof. He declines to dance with Elizabeth, suggesting that she is not pretty enough to tempt him.[2] She finds this amusing and jokes about the statement with her friends. Jane also attracts the attention of Mr Bingley's sister Caroline, who invites her to visit.Jane visits Miss Bingley and is caught in a rain shower on the way, catching a serious cold. Elizabeth, out of genuine concern for her sister's well being, visits her sister there. This is the point at which Darcy begins to see the attraction of Elizabeth, and Miss Bingley is shown to be jealous of Elizabeth since she wants to marry Darcy herself.Mr Collins, a cousin of Mr Bennet and heir to the Longbourn estate, visits the Bennet family. He is a pompous and obsequious clergyman because he expects each of the Bennet girls to wish to marry him due to his inheritance. He plans to propose to Elizabeth over Jane as he is led to believe Jane is taken.Elizabeth and her family meet the dashing and charming Mr Wickham who singles out Elizabeth and tells her a story of the hardship that Mr Darcy has caused him by depriving him of a living (position as clergyman in a prosperous parish with good revenue that once granted, is for life) promised to him by Mr Darcy's late father. Elizabeth's dislike of Mr Darcy is confirmed.[2]At a ball at which Mr Wickham is not present, Elizabeth dances with Mr Darcy rather against her will. Other than Jane and Elizabeth, all the members of the Bennet family show their lack of decorum. Mrs Bennet states loudly that she expects Jane and Bingley to become engaged and each member of the family exposes the whole to ridicule.The following morning, Mr Collins proposes to Elizabeth. She rejects him, to the fury of her mother and the relief of her father. They receive news that the Bingleys are leaving for London, and that Mr Collins has proposed to Charlotte Lucas, a sensible young woman and Elizabeth's friend. ...Jane Austen ( 16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security.

The text of Pride and Prejudice is the 1813 first edition text.

No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice—one of the great classics in literature. Critics in every generation reexamine and reinterpret it, but the rest of us simply fall in love with it—and with its wonderfully charming and intelligent heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. We are captivated not only by Pride and Prejudice's romantic suspense but also by the fascinations of the world we visit in its pages. The life of the English country gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century is made as real to us as our own, not only by Jane Austen’s wit and feeling but by her subtle observation of the way people behave in society and how we are true or treacherous to each other and ourselves.

A perennial favorite in the Norton Critical Editions series, Pride and Prejudice is based on the 1813 first edition text, which has been thoroughly annotated for undergraduate readers. "Backgrounds and Sources" includes biographical portraits of Austen by members of her family and by acclaimed biographers Claire Tomalin and David Nokes. Seventeen of Austen's letters—eight of them new to the Third Edition—allow readers to glimpse the close-knit society that was Austen's world, both in life and in her writing. Samples of Austen's early writing—from the epistolary Love and FriendshipA Collection of Letters—allow readers to trace her growth as a writer as well as to read her fiction comparatively. "Criticism" features eighteen assessments of the novel by nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators, six of them new to the Third Edition. Among them is an interview with Colin Firth on the recent BBC television adaptation of the novel. Also included are pieces by Richard Whately, Margaret Oliphant, Richard Simpson, D. W. Harding, Dorothy Van Ghent, Alistair Duckworth, Stuart Tave, Marilyn Butler, Nina Auerbach, Susan Morgan, Claudia L. Johnson, Susan Fraiman, Deborah Kaplan, Tara Goshal Wallace, Cheryl L. Nixon, David Spring, Edward Ahearn, and Donald Gray. Also included are a Note on Money, a Chronology of Austen's life and work—new to the Third Edition—and an updated Selected Bibliography. About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehenive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

This premium quality large print volume includes the complete and unabridged text of Jane Austen's timeless classic romance in a freshly edited and newly typeset edition. With a large 7.44"x9.69" page size, this Summit Classic Press edition is printed on heavyweight bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design. Page headers and footers and modern design and page layout exemplify the attention to detail given this collector-quality volume. Set among the minor gentry in the vicinity of the fictional town of Meryton, near London in Hertfordshire, the novel follows the activities of Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five daughters of a country gentleman and his rather crass and intellectually limited wife. The story opens with the uproar surrounding the news than a nearby manor house has been rented by a well-to-do young single man from London, and the machinations of the local residents with marriageable daughters which ensue. From that starting point through a series of events both momentous and mundane, appearances and judgments are put to the test as various characters are gradually revealed to be something other than what they have appeared. Jane Austen Born into a family at the lowest tier of the English landed gentry, Jane Austen (1775-1817) found modest critical and financial success in her lifetime, but by 1830 her books had been out of print for a decade when the copyrights were purchased and new illustrated editions included in Richard Bentley's popular "Standard Novels" series. With wider exposure they gained popularity and stature, and sold steadily if not spectacularly. Throughout the 19th century Austen's work had an admiring following among Britain's self-proclaimed "literary elite," but it was really not until the early twentieth century that her novels became the object of academic studies as "great literature". "Pride and Prejudice", published in 1813, was her second published novel. It has become one of the most beloved novels in the English language, with millions of copies sold and numerous adaptations to stage, screen and other forms. Austen's work was part of the transition to realism in 19th century British literature, and her romantic fiction, set for the most part among the gentry of the English countryside was marked by dry wit, satire, and sharp social commentary, often directed at the unfairness of the British legal and cultural systems that left women virtually entirely dependent upon marriage and family for social standing and economic security. In "Pride and Prejudice", for example, Austen uses the repetitive complaints of the mother to attack, indirectly and humorously, the "entailed estate", a form of ownership in which only male heirs can inherit real estate, making the father's cousin, not his wife and daughters, the legal heir to their home. While it is common to identify Austen with Elizabeth, the relationship that develops between Jane, the oldest sister, and Mr. Bingley is remarkably reminiscent of a the brief relationship between young Jane Austen and Thomas LeFroy, a visitor who stayed for a time near Austen's family and would later become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, perhaps the only romance of Austen's life. With the exception of a short period at a boarding school and visits to a brother who was, for a time, a London banker, Austen lived her entire life within a close-knit family group mainly located in the countryside very much like the settings of her novels. In a cruelly ironic twist, Austen's family would suffer the fate feared by Mrs. Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice" when her father died, unexpectedly, leaving his wife and unmarried daughters destitute and dependent upon her brothers for support.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London. Though the story is set at the turn of the 19th century, it retains a fascination for modern readers, continuing near the top of lists of "most loved books" such as The Big Read. It has become one of the most popular novels in English literature and receives considerable attention from literary scholars. Modern interest in the book has resulted in a number of dramatic adaptations and an abundance of novels and stories imitating Austen's memorable characters or themes. To date, the book has sold some 20 million copies worldwide. As Anna Quindlen wrote, Pride and Prejudice is also about that thing that all great novels consider, the search for self. And it is the first great novel that teaches us this search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery.