Pride and Prejudice (Book)

"You could say that – I used to go to bed with Austen every Easter holiday when I was a student! Austen sets the example of how to do what all great literature should do – reveal something about the human condition. Pride and Prejudice is a great example of this. Everyone knows roughly what it is about. Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy misunderstand each other at the outset – he thinks she is rather vulgar, and she thinks that he is horribly stuck up. As the novel goes on they both re-learn how to judge one another, they re-evaluate the other’s moral worth. Among many other things, Pride and Prejudice is an exploration of moral epistemology."

"This book is one of the few perfect novels ever written. Its style and plot and characters are all in balance, with nothing superfluous. Because of this, I think it is easy to overlook quite how revolutionary Austen was when her heroine insisted on a woman’s right to marry for love. Georgian society was even more materialistic and money obsessed than our own, and in those days women were expected to choose prudently, like Elizabeth Bennet’s best friend Charlotte. No sooner does Elizabeth reject the repulsive Mr Collins than Charlotte snaps him up, even though she can’t love him. It’s interesting to remember that Jane Austen turned down a proposal from a gentleman of serious means who wanted to marry her, because she couldn’t marry without love. Although it is true that Elizabeth did very well out of marrying for love when she finally married Mr Darcy, she is chastised by her mother for rejecting Mr Collins. That decision dramatised a turning point in women’s emancipation, because, before you can achieve other kinds of emancipation in the outside world, you have to be emancipated internally, and to see yourself as something worthy of love, and free. Marriage is still one of the most important choices people ever make, and Austen’s novel changes the world for at least half the population by dramatising its dilemmas. I know its themes are still very popular and much debated amongst the Asian girls. It’s not just an enchanting story but something that makes people question their own values."

"It’s about Elizabeth Bennet, who’s 20, and she’s in a situation where there’s a huge necessity for her to marry and marry well. She goes out on a huge limb in deciding or being convinced that she wants to marry for love. In my mind what makes it a teen novel is that Elizabeth is a romantic – and because she’s still young she’s allowed to be a romantic, whereas her father is a very weak man who believes in romance. He says: don’t marry a man you don’t love, which is a slightly ridiculous thing to say to his daughter given her social position. If he were to die of a stroke the next day it couldn’t have been worse advice – they will be out on the street – so in a sense he’s still behaving like a teenager. Elizabeth gets very lucky because passion does win out in the end. I love Elizabeth as a character because she’s acting like a teenager by not considering her future in a serious way, by believing in love – which is a wonderful indulgence. She’s the great true rebel character. I like to read it from a class point of view. I’m always interested in that bit when Jane asks Elizabeth when she first knew she was in love with Darcy, and she says, ‘When I first saw his house’. It’s a coming-of-age story, because she throws aside her prejudices but also sees the house and realises that she could be quite comfortable and maybe realises how important that is."

"Pride and Prejudice really is the GOAT of enemies-to-lovers romance! Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet come from different social classes and face societal expectations and family pressures that they must overcome but their banter reveals how similar they are and their personalities are well-suited to each other. One thing I love about romance novels is when, as a reader, we see clues and glimpses that this couple are meant to be together, long before the characters figure it out for themselves. The reader needs to recognise that these two people are connecting on a deeper level and understand each other, aside from all the external obstacles keeping them apart. The characters must grow and change over the course of the story and that pivot can occur gradually through a slow burn or be a significant event that brings them together through forced proximity. Something that makes Mr Darcy such a favourite male lead is that he’s loyal and shows that with gestures and actions rather than words. He does these acts of kindness expecting no credit. And most importantly, when he’s told of his shortcomings or wrongdoings, he listens, grows as a character and changes his behaviour. I think Elizabeth Bennet fell in love with his strength of character by watching his transformation and, in turn, recognised her part in their misconceptions as well. Enemies-to-lovers trope works so well in romantasy because the characters are often on opposing sides with conflicting allegiances. The couple have external obstacles, sometimes life and death to overcome before they can be together. Above all of that, they are able to see each other’s true selves and fall in love."

"Pride and Prejudice is a very special case for me at the moment, because I’ve just produced an annotated edition with some 2,000 annotations. I remember in the 1970s there was a Penguin edition of Pride and Prejudice , annotated by Tony Tanner, who I think was a wonderful critic. In his introduction he points out that he has only one footnote, and explains that that is because Austen doesn’t need any annotation – she speaks to everyone across the centuries. Now I absolutely agree with that statement; it’s true. I have read Pride and Prejudice , I would guess, 40 or 50 times. I’ve taught it at every level of college, of graduate school. I’ve taught it to faculty seminars, I’ve written about it many times. And when I was asked to annotate it, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the idea. I was finally persuaded because I thought I could annotate it out of my head – I know the book practically by heart. I was so wrong. I think it’s always been my favourite, as it’s many people’s favourite among Jane Austen’s novels. But I was always vaguely embarrassed by that as a scholar, because I didn’t think it was the best. I would say Persuasion is the best of Jane Austen’s novels. But Pride and Prejudice is the one I loved the best. I loved it because it’s a fairy tale; it’s about the poor girl growing up and marrying Prince Charming… One of the criticisms that has often been levelled at Austen is that she lived during the era of the Napoleonic Wars and she never mentions the wars in her novels. Reading through Pride and Prejudice this time, I noticed something that I’d never noticed before. When Elizabeth and Jane come back from Netherfield (when Jane has been sick and Elizabeth has spent a few days with her) the younger sisters are chattering away and giving them the news. It’s typically very trivial – they report that their uncle has entertained the officers, that Colonel Foster is about to be married and that a private was flogged. I thought, how strange that she put that a private was flogged in there – what’s that doing there? And I started reading up on the matter, and discovered the extraordinary brutality of the British army in that era. I discovered the enormous class difference between ordinary soldiers and their officers, and gradually learned about the militia. The fact is that the militia doesn’t exist except when the country is at war, so the fact that a militia regiment comes to town is in itself a signal that the country is at war. In effect, nobody notices, because the life of the village, the life of that small community, is so totally engrossing, so totally absorbing to the people in it, that they not only have no perspective about what the world outside it might think, but they don’t even realise that there is danger. When Lydia goes off to Brighton, the reason the militia is at Brighton, it turns out, is because Brighton was the place most likely to be invaded from France. But nobody thinks for a moment that there might be any danger at Brighton, or that something precarious might be going on there. In short, it turns out that the war is there all the time. Part of the point of the book, part of the point about this community in which all judgements are fast and mostly wrong, is that they are simply unaware of what is going on outside. It’s not that Austen is unaware. So that is one of many examples."

"This book doesn’t need me to call more attention to it, but I couldn’t resist. Although it’s not usually read this way, I think of Pride and Prejudice as a great morality tale about the dangers of certainty. When you read it with this lens of wrongness in place, you see that it is, top to bottom, a book about error. I mean, think about that famous first line: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged…’ etc. This is the most tongue-in-cheek opening ever, and it’s not because Austen is poking fun at Mrs Bennet. It’s because she’s poking fun at universally acknowledged truths. In this book, the more universally acknowledged a truth is, the more you can bet it will turn out to be wrong. What Elizabeth Bennet thinks about Wickham, what she thinks about Darcy, what Darcy thinks of Jane – everything that is strongly felt and seemingly self-evident turns out to completely erroneous. There’s that wonderful moment when Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth and she says something like: ‘If you were the last man on earth I could never, in a million years, marry you.’ I mean, whoops. We all know how that turns out. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But the other reason I chose this book is that it’s not just that Elizabeth and the other characters that are wrong. It’s also you the reader. There’s a long tradition of the readers or the audience being in the know while characters are in the dark: that’s the comedy in Comedy of Errors , for instance. But one of the wonderful things about how Jane Austen chooses to tell this story is that, when you read Pride and Prejudice , you’re right there believing exactly what Elizabeth Bennet believes: Darcy is a jerk, Wickham is a cute young lieutenant, and so forth. So your ideas collapse along with hers. The book is about the pleasure of being wrong. We forget that wrongness can be deeply pleasurable, but thankfully we have literature and art to remind us. In that context, we all love the experience of being wrong: think about the way we take so much delight in red herrings, in suspense, in surprise endings. I wanted to pay homage to that experience – to the delight we sometimes experience in being wrong. To be wrong is to be surprised, and I think in day-to-day life, we’re often disorientated and upset by that experience. But in literature or art it’s safe to explore that disorientation. Pride and Prejudice is like an optical illusion. It looks like one thing is happening, and then, on a dime, it switches and you see that something totally different was happening all along. That experience is exciting as long as it’s not terrifying. In literature, the fear and uncertainty associated with surprise, confusion and error is removed, and we just get to just take pleasure in the infinite different possibilities of the world."

"An emotive full-cast adaptation of Jane Austen’s most famous novel ranges from stellar narrative performances to Bridgerton -esque laughter and sighs. There are no weak performances here, with Darcy (Harris Dickinson), Lizzy (Marisa Abela), her parents (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Bill Nighy), and Lady Catherine (Glenn Close) especially owning Austen’s spirit. While the adaptation makes changes in dialogue that simplify or modernize Austen’s beloved work, there’s an intriguing something here that’s not to be missed. (4.5 hours)"