Pride-and-Prejudice

Austen’s day, Mr. Collins’s sentiment would merely seem ridiculous. Austen’s
purpose in placing “condescension” in the mouth of the foolish Mr. Collins is
not to question the lack of equality between him and Lady Catherine, but to
begin to expose the flaws of both characters.
8 (p. 154) the Lakes: The Lake District, in the far northwest of England,
remains one of the most picturesque areas of Great Britain. It is associated
with the Romantic school of poets, who wrote tenderly of the region. William
Wordsworth lived at Dove Cottage near Lake Grasmere in this district from
1799 to 1808 and was visited there by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott,
and Thomas De Quincey, among others. Although Austen was a
contemporary of the Romantic writers, she is generally not considered to have
been a part of that school, although inclusion as a Romantic depends partly on
one’s definition of the term. Elizabeth’s gleeful response to her aunt’s
proposal—“What are men to rocks and mountains?”—is a romantic
sentiment, to be sure, but its irony marks Austen’s distance from such
emotional effusions.
9 (p. 205) Till this moment, I never knew myself: One of the climactic
moments of the novel, Elizabeth’s declaration of sudden self-knowledge is in
the tradition of the “recognition” scene (or anagnorisis ) of classical tragedy
and Shakespeare. Elizabeth’s initial hubris and her error in judgment—her
pride and prejudice—lead her, like a tragic hero, to misread the situation at
hand and, after being enlightened, to experience an acute sense of shame.
Unlike the tragic hero, Elizabeth learns of her mistake and recognizes her own
shortcomings in time to make amends.
10 (p. 234) Matlock, Chatsworth, Dovedale, or the Peak: Mrs. Gardiner has
decided to forego these picturesque tourist destinations found chiefly in
Derbyshire, the north Midlands county where Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley is
situated. The Gardiners have also decided to shorten the trip. To continue to
the Lake District would have taken them much farther north than the revised
plan, which already takes them a significant distance north and west of
London, if we consider that they traveled in a horse-drawn coach on earlynineteenth-century
roads. Although Austen does mention Chatsworth in this
passage, some scholars have argued that this magnificent estate also provided
the model for the fictional Pemberley. Others have suggested that Mr. Darcy,
wealthy as he is, could not have supported a manor house and grounds this
grand. Today the 35,000-acre estate of Chatsworth, seat of the eleventh Duke
and Duchess of Devonshire (whose ancestors acquired most of the land in
1549), remains a popular tourist destination.