Pride-and-Prejudice

Endnotes
1 (p. 6) four or five thousand a year: See the Introduction on Austen’s
attention to money and class.
2 (p. 8) “When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?”: In the standard edition, R. W.
Chapman gives this sentence to Mr. Bennet, arguing that Kitty would already
know the date of her sister’s next ball and citing typographical evidence from
the first edition of 1813 to support his point (The Novels of Jane Austen; see
“For Further Reading”). A reader might, however, expect that Kitty would be
more interested in opening a discussion of the ball than would Mr. Bennet.
This minor question of attribution points to a characteristic problem that
Austen noted in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, when the first edition of
Pride and Prejudice was published. Even though Austen assumed that her
clever readers would be undaunted by a few obscure lines, she admitted that
“a ‘said he,’ or a ‘said she,’ would sometimes make the dialogue more
immediately clear” (Jane Austen: Selected Letters 1796-1817, edited by R. W.
Chapman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 132).
3 (p. 19) knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty: Mr.
William Lucas’s civic office of mayor has allowed him to express his
constituents’ appreciation and concerns in a formal address to King George
III. In honor of this occasion and of Mr. Lucas’s civic and economic services
to his country, the king has bestowed upon Mr. Lucas a knighthood, which
allows him to adopt the title “Sir” during his lifetime. He receives this honor
during a ceremony at St. James’s Palace in London, one of the King’s formal
residences. Mrs. Lucas now becomes Lady Lucas, but the Lucas children will
not inherit the title. A member of Austen’s society would recognize that Lady
Lucas does not hold the more prestigious inherited rank of Mr. Darcy’s aunt,
Lady Catherine, because the latter may be called by her first name.
4 (p. 29) entailed … on a distant relation: The inheritance of the Bennet
property is limited to male heirs. Later in the novel, we learn that Mr. Bennet
regrets not having saved part of his disposable income for his wife and
daughters. We also learn that the limited resources the Bennet girls will
inherit will come from Mrs. Bennet’s marriage portion, which has been
invested at a low, but stable, rate of interest. In order to live comfortably, the
girls will need to marry well. Among the gentry and aristocracy, the
inheritance of an estate (which, in the case of the Bennets, includes the house,