1813
Jane Austen, the quiet unmarried daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, was certainly no revolutionary – but Pride and Prejudice, the most popular of her six books, brought a new realism to the English novel. Her ironic detachment and minute concentration on character, personality and provincial society make Pride and Prejudice one of the first novels to feel truly modern in tone.
When Jane Austen (1775–1817) was writing, novels were considered barely respectable. Partly for that reason, her books were published anonymously. But Pride and Prejudice helped to bring novel-writing within the socially acceptable mainstream of early 19th-century literary activity.
When it appeared in 1813, Austen had been writing plays, verses and stories for more than 20 years. A novel, Sense and Sensibility, had been published two years earlier, while another, Mansfield Park, appeared in 1814. By the time Emma was published in 1815, Austen had acquired a devoted following, and the book was dedicated to the Prince Regent (later George IV), who had let it be known that he was a great admirer of the books. Northanger Abbey (an early work, completed in 1803) and Persuasion were published in 1817, shortly after her death.
Like all her novels, Pride and Prejudice is the story of how a young woman navigates pitfalls and misunderstandings on the way to marriage, and how she gains deeper self-knowledge and a wider understanding of other people as she does so. At the same time, Austen provides subtly implied but incisive critiques of her characters and their attitudes and actions.
On the face of it, her novels are remarkable for how little the outside world impinges on them. As she was writing, Europe was convulsed by the Napoleonic Wars, Britain was undergoing a period of political repression, and the Industrial Revolution was beginning to change daily life across vast areas of the country almost beyond recognition. Why, then, are they regarded as triumphs of realism or held up as examples of early feminist writing? Because, at the level of society Austen wrote about, she illuminated the complex social and economic rituals and constraints that determined people’s lives, and in particular women’s lives. And she did it in her own quiet but forensic way.
The heroine of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet, is the intelligent and spirited daughter of a wry country gentleman. He has no sons, and by virtue of the legalities of inheritance the family home and the income from it will pass on his death to a distant male relative rather than to his daughters. It is the principal reason why Elizabeth’s mother is desperate for her daughters to make a ‘good marriage’, and the novel starts with the author’s own famous sideways comment on such ambition: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’
Just such a single man comes into the Bennets’ neighbourhood in the person of Mr Bingley, a well-born and wealthy landowner, and Mrs Bennet claims him as the ‘rightful property’ of her own family. However, her plans for Bingley to marry her eldest daughter, Jane, are thwarted by Bingley’s friend, the also wealthy Fitzwilliam Darcy, who advises him that the marriage would be unsuitable.
It transpires, however, that Darcy has fallen in love with Elizabeth. The pride and prejudice of the title apply to both of them – Darcy is proud of his rank and fortune, and prejudiced against Elizabeth’s family and her foolish mother, while Elizabeth takes a prickly pride in her own independence, and is prejudiced against what she sees as Darcy’s self-importance and snobbery.
Set against the Elizabeth–Darcy two-step are the lives of Elizabeth’s sisters and their own aspirations and options, which range from giddy obsession with a glamorous, feckless military officer (resulting in an ill-advised marriage) to an inevitable drift towards self-effacing spinsterhood and a life at the piano.
Eventually, Elizabeth and Darcy come to understand each other, and marriage ensues. Elizabeth is installed as chatelaine of Pemberley, Darcy’s country mansion, and those characters who tried to keep them apart have been discomfited. Importantly, in their own ways both of them reject the conformities attached to their class; but, Austen implies, not everyone is so lucky.
It is a slight and simple plot, which it is impossible to imagine being written by Daniel Defoe (c.1660–1731) or Henry Fielding (1707–54) during the years before her, or even by her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). Scott made much the same point in his diary shortly after her death. ‘The big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.’
Where Romantic novelists such as Scott and, later, the Brontës shouted, Jane Austen whispered. Scott realized that Austen was a notable literary talent, but some 30 years after her death, Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) still dismissed her work contemptuously: ‘Her business is not half so much with the human heart,’ she wrote, ‘as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet.’ But an important part of Austen’s achievement was that she took ordinary people in everyday circumstances – and examined how they reacted to their small triumphs and disasters. The point about her characters is that within that world, they are generally unexceptional.
Pride and Prejudice then, like Austen’s other novels, is classically simple in its construction, but Jane Austen was a genuine innovator. The originality lies not just in the way that her books revolve around the ordinary and the everyday, but also in the way her acute representation of apparently unremarkable conversations helps to reveal the hidden meanings and motives in what is said. In addition, her narrative technique broke new ground. One of the most important ‘characters’ in all her novels is that of the narrator herself – a detached commentator who plays no part in the action. The raised eyebrow of ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ is echoed repeatedly and concentrates the reader’s attention on the novel as moral and social critique.
Austen received little critical attention while she was alive, although her novels rapidly enjoyed fashionable success. Later in the century, the mass of the reading public began to agree with Charlotte Bronte’s criticism of the lack of passionate emotion in her novels. But if Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads prepared the way for Romantic poetry in England, Jane Austen’s work performed a similar service for the realist novel that dominated the 19th century.
This quiet realism of Jane Austen’s is in marked contrast to the macabre plots of the then popular Gothic novels. Writers such as Horace Walpole (1717–97) and Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) seized enthusiastically on the Romantic fascination with horror, passion and the supernatural. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was perhaps the most famous example.
Jane Austen wrote a parody of the Gothic novel in Northanger Abbey and was reacting against this fashion with Pride and Prejudice. ‘Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on,’ she famously said about novel-writing, and the stability of the world she describes contrasts strikingly with the menacing fury and emotional intensity of the Gothic novels.
Later in the century, books like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874) developed Jane Austen’s realism and restraint. But the Gothic tradition also endured, in such works as Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847).
In the modern age, a revived appreciation of Jane Austen has led to burgeoning academic interest – in technique, Austen’s ‘feminist’ status, her social concerns, and the degree to which the books reflected her life. It has also produced an enormous mass readership, particularly among women, who have appreciated the irony, perceptiveness and the sheer satisfaction of these ‘comedies of manners’. It is no wonder that the novels, and preeminently Pride and Prejudice, have spawned many film and television adaptations.