Pride-and-Prejudice

Introduction
Long before Austenmania overtook America and England in the mid-1990s,
when major films and television miniseries were produced of Jane Austen’s
most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, and three other of the six novels
Austen completed as an adult, fans reported a private, proprietary sense of
“Jane,” as though the great English novelist were a close acquaintance.
Rudyard Kipling exploited this phenomenon in his short story “The Janeites,”
which describes several members of a secret Jane Austen society, a group of
soldiers in the trenches of World War I, well versed in Austen trivia and
gallant defenders of “Jane” and the world she created. Both the jealously
guarded private fantasy and the recent popular cultural phenomenon may be
attributed in part to the enduring power of Austen’s genius as a writer: her
ability to create singular characters who linger in one’s imagination, her
unparalleled sense of irony and wit, her brilliant dialogue, and her carefully
woven plots. At the same time, Austen delivers a satisfying romance, more so
in Pride and Prejudice than in her other novels, and the sheer happiness of
her main characters at the novel’s end has its own appeal.
Above all though, and in Pride and Prejudice especially, Austen appeals to
modern readers’ nostalgia for a world of social, moral, and economic stability,
but one where characters are free to make their own choices and pursue their
hearts’ desires. The formal civility, the carefully prescribed manners, and
sexual and social restraint, set against a backdrop of village community,
stately manor houses, and an English landscape devoid of industrial turmoil
and the brisk pace of modern technology—these are a welcome escape for
today’s reader. So, too, the heroine Elizabeth Bennet’s bold independence and
insistence on placing individual preference above economic motive in
marriage satisfies our desire for a plot shaped through the pursuit of personal
fulfillment. A convention of morality tales of Austen’s time is that
individuals’ personal freedoms and aspirations cannot be easily reconciled
with their responsibilities to family and community. Austen overcomes this
difficulty by employing the classic comic form: When wedding bells are
about to ring at the story’s conclusion, we know that the two sets of main
characters have made marriages of affection (Elizabeth’s sister Jane and Mr.
Bingley) or even passion (Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy) and that these happy
unions actually enhance the stability of society. That it appears to the reader