[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 a Preface by George Saintsbury and Illustrations by Hugh Thomson

[Illustration: 1894]

Ruskin House, 156 Charing Cross Road, London — George Allen, Publisher

Printed by the Chiswick Press, Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, London.

[Illustration: To J. Comyns Carr, in thanks for his friendship and advice, these illustrations are gratefully dedicated. — Hugh Thomson]

PREFACE

The poet Walt Whitman once made a smart and true observation: there is a difference between "loving something out of habit" and "loving something with real, personal feeling." This idea applies to books just as much as it does to people. Only a few authors inspire that second kind of deep, personal love. But when they do, something interesting happens — readers disagree much more about which of that author's works is the best. This is different from authors people admire simply because convention says they should be admired.

Jane Austen is one of those rare authors with true devoted fans — sometimes called "Janites." Among this fairly large but especially picky group, you could probably find someone arguing that almost any of her novels deserves to be called her masterpiece.

Some readers love Northanger Abbey for its freshness, humor, polish, and lively energy (entrain). But even its biggest fans have to admit two things: it's smaller in scale than her other books, and at its heart it is really a parody — a genre that rarely reaches the very top rank of literature.

Persuasion is quieter in tone and doesn't grab readers with thrilling plot twists, but some fans praise its delicate, careful balance above all her other books.

Mansfield Park has a climax that feels almost like something from a stage melodrama. Its hero and heroine are a bit dull, and Austen seems to deliberately drain away the romance by admitting that Edmund only chose Fanny because another woman, Mary, disappointed him — and that Fanny herself might well have accepted a different suitor, Crawford, if he'd tried a little harder. Still, the brilliant scenes where the characters rehearse a play, along with vivid figures like Mrs. Norris, have won this novel a devoted following too.

Sense and Sensibility probably has the fewest passionate, all-in admirers, but it still has plenty of readers who enjoy it.

I think if you polled a reasonably knowledgeable group of readers, most votes would land on either Emma or the book in front of you, Pride and Prejudice. If we're being honest about popular opinion — and loving Jane Austen at all might already prove you're not exactly "common" in taste — most people might actually pick Emma. It's bigger, more varied, and more crowd-pleasing. By the time she wrote it, Austen had seen more of the world, and her everyday dialogue had gotten sharper, even if her most distinctive style hadn't changed. Characters like Miss Bates and the Eltons are impossible not to love.

But for my part, I choose Pride and Prejudice without hesitation. To me, it is the most perfectly built, the most true to her unique style, and the most "Jane Austen" of all her books. In the small space I have here, I want to explain why.

First, a quick reminder: Austen wrote an early version of this novel very young — around 1796, when she was barely twenty-one. She revised and finished it about fifteen years later at her home in Chawton, and it wasn't published until 1813, only four years before she died. I'm not sure whether this mix of youthful energy and mature, careful editing is exactly why the book's construction feels stronger than in her other novels — but to me, it clearly does.

The plot isn't complicated, but it's built almost as tightly and logically as something by the novelist Henry Fielding. You could barely remove a single character or event without damaging the story. When Lydia runs off with Wickham, it isn't a sudden shocking twist thrown in for drama (a coup de théâtre) — unlike a similar elopement in Mansfield Park. Instead, it connects logically to everything that happened earlier in the story and leads naturally to the ending (the denouement).

Every smaller storyline — Jane and Bingley's romance, Mr. Collins's arrival, the visit to Hunsford, the trip through Derbyshire — fits together in this same quiet but skillful way. There's none of the back-and-forth guessing games that occur between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax in Emma. Those add mystery to that book, but I don't think they're its best feature. Austen clearly liked stories built around misunderstandings — they let her show off her greatest talent, which I'll get to shortly. But in Pride and Prejudice, she relies only on natural, believable confusion: Wickham's false story about Darcy, and the awkwardness that builds naturally as Elizabeth's feelings shift from strong dislike to real love.

I don't know if any playwright has ever tried turning Pride and Prejudice into a stage play. If someone did, I suspect the plot might feel too subtle and quiet for a big dramatic stage, and the characters too delicate for an audience looking for something flashy. But whoever tried it would at least not have to fix any sloppy plot construction — a problem that sometimes hides easily in a novel but becomes obvious the moment you try to act it out.

That said — and I know this idea might annoy some literary critics — I don't think plot construction is actually a novelist's highest skill. It makes an author's other talents look more impressive to a careful critic, and its absence can quietly weaken those talents even for readers who aren't especially critical. But a poorly built novel full of wonderful, funny, or touching characters — or written with brilliant dialogue, which might be the rarest skill of all — would still be far better than a perfectly plotted story populated by lifeless, wooden characters.

So even though Austen clearly worked hard on the plot here, I would rank Pride and Prejudice much lower if it didn't also contain what I consider Austen's greatest achievements in humor and character-building. These characters belong in the same company as John Thorpe, the Eltons, and Mrs. Norris from her other books — and in at least one case, I think they surpass them all.

Austen's sense of humor is so delicate and subtle that it's easier to feel than to explain in words — and different readers are likely to describe it differently. To me, her humor feels closest to that of the eighteenth-century writer Joseph Addison, more than to any other type of British humor. Of course, there are obvious differences — different time periods, different subjects, different writing styles of their eras. The fact that one was a man and one a woman probably matters less than you'd think, since Addison's famous fictional narrator, "Mr. Spectator," had a distinctly feminine gentleness, while Austen's writing — though never masculine exactly — often had a firm, clear-eyed quality some might call "masculine" in the old-fashioned sense.

The real similarity between them lies in a shared set of qualities: quiet reserve, extremely careful attention to small details, and an avoidance of loud, obvious effects. Both also share something else — a kind of gentle but sharp cruelty. People who judge quickly like to contrast "kind" writers like Addison and Austen with "harsh" ones like Jonathan Swift, or with the rowdier humor of novelists like Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett — even with the rough practical jokes that Austen's literary predecessor, Frances Burney, allowed into her books without much complaint. But both Addison and Austen — in a restrained, polite way — clearly took real pleasure in mocking fools, cutting them down carefully and completely.

Naturally, a man writing in the early 1700s could push this kind of mockery further than a woman writing in the early 1800s. Austen's own values, and her kind heart, would never have let her write something as extreme as one letter in The Spectator, where an unfortunate husband cheerfully and innocently describes how his wife and his friend trick him into playing blind-man's-buff. But another Spectator letter — from a fourteen-year-old girl who wants to marry a man named Mr. Shapely and gushes that "he admires your Spectators mightily" — could easily have been written by a slightly more polished and clever version of Lydia Bennet, generations earlier.

On the other hand, some critics have unfairly called Austen "cynical" for moments like her gentle mockery of Mrs. Musgrove's exaggerated grief over her son. But the word "cynical" gets misused constantly — especially when people apply it, wrongly, to soft, indirect satire instead of harsh, biting criticism. If being "cynical" simply means noticing that there's often another side to a story, sensing the hidden troubles beneath a calm surface, understanding that people's motives are usually mixed and complicated, and realizing that how someone appears isn't always who they are — then every wise person who refuses to live in a fantasy world, who understands real human nature, counts as a cynic. And in that sense, yes, Jane Austen certainly was one.

She may even have shared something with her own character Mr. Bennet, who took quiet, almost mischievous pleasure in studying fools and petty people and watching them reveal themselves. I believe Austen felt that same pleasure — and I don't think less of her as a person for it. As a writer, it made her immensely better at her craft.

Speaking of her artistic skill more broadly, the critic Goldwin Smith once rightly said that writers have used up every possible comparison trying to describe how perfect — yet how narrow — her focus was. He's right that we don't need to look further than her own comparison of her writing to a miniature painter's careful, tiny brushstrokes. But to understand that comparison properly, we shouldn't think of "miniature" in the narrow, small-scale sense — we should picture painters like Memling or Meissonier, master artists known for incredibly fine detail, rather than a painter like Cosway, known mainly for tiny portrait miniatures.

Honestly, I'm not even sure "narrow" is the right word for her at all. Her fictional world may be small, but its depth and richness are at least as impressive as its size. She never wrote about anything she didn't feel qualified to describe — but that does