Pride and Prejudice

[Illustration:

GEORGE ALLEN
PUBLISHER

156 CHARING CROSS ROAD
LONDON

RUSKIN HOUSE
]

[Illustration:

_Reading Jane's Letters._ _Chapter 34._
]

PRIDE
and
PREJUDICE

by
Jane Austen,

with an Introduction by
George Saintsbury
and
Pictures by
Hugh Thomson

[Illustration: 1894]

Ruskin 156 Charing
House. Cross Road.

London
George Allen.

[Illustration:

_To J. Comyns Carr,
to thank him for his friendship
and help, these pictures are
gratefully given._

_Hugh Thomson_
]

INTRODUCTION.

[Illustration]

The poet Walt Whitman once made an interesting point. He said there is a difference between "loving something because you are supposed to" and "loving something with your whole heart." This idea works for books too, not just for people. Some authors are loved by only a few readers, but those readers love them with their whole hearts. When this happens, people often disagree strongly about which of that author's books is the very best.

Jane Austen is one of these special authors. Her fans (sometimes called "Janites") argue about which of her novels is her greatest. Some readers love Northanger Abbey best. It is fresh, funny, and full of energy. But it is a smaller book, and it makes fun of other novels instead of standing fully on its own. Other readers prefer Persuasion. It is quieter and less exciting, but its fans love how delicate and careful it is. The ending of Mansfield Park feels a bit too dramatic, and the hero and heroine are not very interesting. Austen almost seems to poke fun at romance herself—she tells us plainly that Edmund only chose Fanny because another woman, Mary, disappointed him, and that Fanny might have chosen Mr. Crawford instead if he had tried a little harder to win her. Even so, the practice scenes for a play in that book, and characters like Mrs. Norris, have won Mansfield Park many fans. Sense and Sensibility has fewer super-fans, but people still enjoy it.

Most readers, though, probably argue between two books: Emma and Pride and Prejudice. Many people would choose Emma. It is bigger, has more variety, and is more popular. By the time Austen wrote it, she had seen more of the world, and her writing had grown even better. Characters like Miss Bates and the Eltons are loved by almost everyone. But I choose Pride and Prejudice without any doubt. To me, it is Austen's most perfect book—the one that shows her special skills the best. I will explain why.

First, remember that Austen wrote an early version of this book when she was only about twenty-one years old, around 1796. She rewrote and finished it about fifteen years later, at a house called Chawton. It was finally published in 1813, just four years before she died. I'm not sure if this mix—young, energetic writing combined with careful editing later in life—explains why this book is built so much better than her others. But to me, it is. The plot is simple, but almost every character and event matters to the story; nothing could be removed without hurting it. When Lydia runs off with Wickham, it isn't a sudden shocking twist just for effect, the way a similar event feels in Mansfield Park. Instead, it connects naturally to everything that happened earlier and leads perfectly to the story's ending. Every smaller part of the story—Jane and Bingley falling in love, Mr. Collins arriving, the visit to Hunsford, the trip to Derbyshire—fits together just as smoothly. There's none of the back-and-forth confusion you find in Emma, where Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax keep secrets from everyone. That confusion makes Emma exciting, but I don't think it's the best part of that book. Austen liked using misunderstandings in her stories, since they let her show off her incredible talent (which I'll explain soon). But in Pride and Prejudice, the misunderstandings feel completely natural. They come from Wickham's false story about Darcy, and from the awkwardness that builds as Elizabeth's feelings slowly change from disliking Darcy to loving him. I don't know if anyone has ever tried turning this book into a play. If they did, I imagine the story might feel too quiet and the characters too subtle for a big, dramatic stage. But if someone did try, at least they wouldn't run into the loose, messy plot problems that show up so clearly once a story is acted out instead of read.

Still, I don't think a well-built plot is a novelist's greatest gift. A perfect plot makes an author's other talents look even better to a careful reader. And a poorly built story can quietly weaken those talents, even for readers who aren't studying it closely. But even a badly built novel can be wonderful if it has excellent, funny or touching characters, or brilliant conversations (writing great dialogue might be the hardest skill of all). Such a book would be far better than a perfectly plotted story filled with boring, lifeless characters. Even though Austen built her plot skillfully in Pride and Prejudice, I would think much less of the book if it didn't also contain what I believe are her very best characters and her sharpest humor. These characters might stand alongside her other great comic creations—like John Thorpe, the Eltons, or Mrs. Norris—but at least one of them, I believe, is even better.

Austen's humor is delicate and subtle. It's easier to notice than to explain, and different readers often notice different things. To me, her humor feels most similar to the humor of the writer Joseph Addison, more than to any other type of British humor. Of course, their styles, time periods, subjects, and writing styles are very different. Being male or female doesn't seem to matter much either—Addison's famous character "Mr. Spectator" had a somewhat feminine side, and Austen's writing, while never masculine exactly, contained plenty of qualities usually thought of as more typical of men. But their humor is alike in many smaller ways: both are quiet and careful, notice tiny details, and avoid loud or flashy jokes. Both writers also share a certain gentle, but very real, cruelty. People often say that Addison was kind and gentle compared to angrier writers like Jonathan Swift, just as they say Austen was gentler than rowdier writers like Fielding, Smollett, or even Frances Burney, who allowed harsh practical jokes in her books without much complaint. But really, both Addison and Austen enjoyed—politely, but without mercy—making fun of foolish people. A male writer in the early 1700s could go further with this than a woman writing in the early 1800s. Certainly, Austen's own values, and her kind heart, would never have let her write something as harsh as a Spectator story about a husband tricked by his wife and friend into playing blind-man's-buff, all told with cheerful, innocent enjoyment. But another Spectator letter—from a fourteen-year-old girl who wants to marry a man named Mr. Shapely, and tells her advisor that "he admires your Spectators mightily"—sounds almost like something a smarter, more polite version of Lydia Bennet might have written generations earlier. On the other hand, some readers (unfairly, I think) call Austen "cynical" for gently poking fun at Mrs. Musgrove's fake sadness about her son. But the word "cynical" gets used wrong all the time, especially when people use it to describe soft, clever teasing instead of harsh, angry attacks. If being "cynical" means noticing there are two sides to every story, understanding that people's reasons for doing things are rarely simple, and knowing that how someone appears isn't always how they truly are—then anyone who understands real life, and refuses to live in a make-believe world, is a cynic. In that sense, Austen certainly was one. She may have even enjoyed, like her own character Mr. Bennet, carefully studying and exposing foolish or unkind people in her stories. I believe she did enjoy this, and I don't think less of her as a person for it—in fact, it made her a much better writer.

A writer named Mr. Goldwin Smith once said that people have used up every possible comparison trying to describe how perfect, yet how small in scope, Austen's writing is. He was right to remind us of Austen's own comparison: she said her writing was like the work of a miniature painter, someone who paints very small, extremely detailed pictures. To understand this fully, we shouldn't think of "miniature" as meaning simple or plain—think instead of detailed, skillful painters like Memling or Meissonier, rather than simpler miniature artists like Cosway. I'm also not sure I agree that her writing world was truly "narrow," or limited. Even though her stories focus on a small world, that small world feels just as rich and complete as it is small. She never wrote about things she didn't feel ready to describe—but that doesn't mean she couldn't have written about bigger things if she had wanted to. It's worth noting that