Pride-and-Prejudice

Earlier she had cautioned Fanny against entering into a marriage of
convenience by remarking, “When I consider … how capable you are … of
being really in love … I cannot wish you to be fettered” (Letters, pp. 332,
286).
While it was not unheard of for a woman to have both a family and a
writing career in the eighteenth century, it was undoubtedly the case that
Austen’s marital status made her writing life much easier. There is, however,
no evidence to suggest that she deliberately chose to forsake marriage in order
to write books about it. In fact, the extent to which Austen actually saw
herself as a writer, as someone whose identity was shaped through her writing
and who might have been interested in earning money or fame by doing so, is
a matter of debate. She may have described herself, with alternating irony and
seriousness, as someone who took up the pen in her idle hours, the way one
might take up fancy needlework or china painting. Yet she clearly had a
lifelong passion for writing—she authored an impressive collection of
juvenilia as well as mature novels—and it seems difficult to believe that she
regarded her art as a mere hobby, even if she did not flaunt her gifts publicly.
If she did not claim the kind of psychological and material entitlement, the
room of one’s own that in the early twentieth century Virginia Woolf would
identify as essential for women writers, she did come to depend on the money
her novels earned. She became, whether she wished it or not, a professional
writer in an age when the market in novels by women and for women was
already well established. Pride and Prejudice was published anonymously, as
were the works of many women writers to whom publicity seemed indelicate,
and while Austen did not court fame, she nevertheless created a stir with her
first publication, Sense and Sensibility (1811).
Austen’s second published novel, Pride and Prejudice, appeared at the
beginning of 1813, after having been revised the previous year. A first version
of the novel, the manuscript of which is now lost, had been written many
years earlier, between October 1796 and August 1797. Austen called that
early version “First Impressions,” a suggestive title that draws upon stock
associations with conduct books to point a moral lesson: One’s first
impressions of character should be mistrusted or at least managed with
caution; opinion and judgment must be formed through careful reflection and
consultation. Although rooted in a didactic message about first impressions,
Austen’s exploration of the subsequent themes of pride and prejudice is far
more textured than any superficial association with conduct manuals would
suggest. The phrase “pride and prejudice” held currency in eighteenth-century
literature, but, as the editor R. W. Chapman has shown, Austen appears to