Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 and is Jane Austen's second novel to appear in print, though she had written an early version of it years earlier as a series of letters. She wrote the first draft when she was in her early twenties, and it was eventually accepted for publication after Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811. Austen published it anonymously, as she did all her novels, and the title page described the author only as a lady.

The novel is a comedy of manners built on a small set of families and a small set of events: a ball, a visit, a refusal, a letter, a journey to Derbyshire, an elopement and a settlement. Its subject is not really courtship but judgement. Elizabeth and Darcy both make errors early in the book and both have to revise them, and Austen arranges the plot so that the reader is drawn into the same misreading. The supporting cast, including Mr Collins, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and the Bennets themselves, are drawn with an accuracy that has kept the book quotable for two centuries.

The novel has never been out of print. It is the most adapted of Austen's books, with films, television serials, radio plays and a widely read modern retelling, and it is the novel most readers meet first when they come to nineteenth-century English fiction. It sits on the shelf between the historical romances and the fiction of manners, and it can be read without any of the other books.