Pride and Prejudice (6 page)

12.
More, Vol. VIII, p. 24.

13.
Ibid., Vol. VII, p. 4.

14.
Wollstonecraft,
Vindication
, p. 192.

15.
More, Vol. VII, p. 6.

16.
Wollstonecraft,
Vindication
, p. 192.

17.
More, Vol. VII, pp. 181, 183–4.

18.
Wollstonecraft,
Maria
, p. 114.

19.
More, Vol. VII, pp. 195–6.

20.
Wollstonecraft,
Vindication
, pp. 224, 152.

21.
Richardson, p. 78.

22.
Ibid., p. 463.

(See also lists of references in General Notes at the end)

Biography and Letters

Jane Austen: A Family Record
, by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, revised and enlarged by Deirdre Le Faye (London: The British Library, 1989)

Jane Austen’s Letters
, collected and edited by Deirdre Le Faye, 3rd edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Fergus, Jan,
Jane Austen: A Literary Life
(Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1991)

Honan, Park,
Jane Austen: Her Life
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987)

Tomalin, Claire,
Jane Austen: A Life
(Harmondsworth: Viking, 1997)

Butler, Marilyn,
Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
(1975; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)

Clark, Robert (ed.), ‘
Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice
’ New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1994)

Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

——,
Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Duckworth, Alistair,
The Improvement of the Estate: A Study
of Jane Austen’s Novels
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971)

Fergus, Jan,
Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel:
‘
Northanger Abbey
’, ‘
Sense and Sensibility
’
and
‘
Pride and Prejudice
’ (London, Macmillan, 1983)

Grey, David, A. Walton Litz and Brian Southam (eds.),
The Jane Austen Handbook: With a Dictionary of Jane Austen’s Life and Works
(London: Athlone Press, 1986)

Johnson, Claudia L.,
Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Jones, Vivien,
How to Study a Jane Austen Novel
, 2nd edition (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997)

Kaplan, Deborah,
Jane Austen among Women
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)

Kirkham, Margaret,
Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983)

Lascelles, Mary,
Jane Austen and Her Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939)

McMaster, Juliet (ed.),
Jane Austen the Novelist: Essays Past and Present
(Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1995)

Monaghan, David,
Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision
(London: Macmillan, 1980)

—— (ed.),
Jane Austen in a Social Context
(London: Macmillan, 1981)

Neill, Edward,
The Politics of Jane Austen
(Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999)

Newton, Judith Lowder, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in
Women, Power and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778–1860
(New York and London: Methuen, 1981)

Poovey, Mary,
The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984)

Sales, Roger,
Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England
(London: Routledge, 1994)

Stafford, Fiona, ‘Jane Austen’ in Michael O’Neill (ed.),
Literature
of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)

Tanner, Tony,
Jane Austen
(London: Macmillan, 1986)

Troost, Linda and Sayre Greenfield (eds.),
Jane Austen in Hollywood
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998)

Wiltshire, John,
Jane Austen and the Body:
‘
The Picture of Health
’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)

The Republic of Pemberley,
http://www.pemberley.com/

The Jane Austen Society of North America,
http://www.jasna.org/

Mohanty, Suchi,
Jane Austen: A Pathfinder
,
http://www.ils.unc.edu/~mohas/austenpathfinder.htm

The first edition of
Pride and Prejudice
was published in January 1813, price eighteen shillings. No manuscript of the novel survives, and there is no record of Jane Austen having corrected proofs. She sold the manuscript to Egerton in 1812 for £110, as she records in a letter to Martha Lloyd on 29 November: ‘P. & P. is sold.—Egerton gives £110 for it.—I would rather have had £150, but we could not both be pleased, & I am not at all surprised that he should not chuse to hazard so much.’
¹
When she received her copy of the first edition, Austen noted: ‘There are a few Typical errors—& a “said he” or a “said she” would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear—but “I do not write for such dull Elves”

“As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.”

—The 2
^d
vol. is shorter than I c
^d
wish—but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of Narrative in that part’ (29 January 1813).
²
She also noted ‘the greatest blunder in the Printing…where two speeches are made into one’ (4 February 1813).
³
Having sold the copyright, Austen had nothing to do with subsequent editions of the novel so, as Chapman notes, ‘the unique authority of the first edition is critically indisputable’.
⁴
The second edition, published in October 1813, was a complete resetting of the first with some minor variations in spelling and punctuation. The third edition, published in 1817, was reset into two volumes, dividing the novel after the thirty-third chapter (Vol. II, chap. x), an arrangement which persisted until Chapman’s edition of 1923 restored Austen’s original volume division. Neither edition corrected the paragraphing ‘blunder’ which Austen noted.

This edition of
Pride and Prejudice
is based on the text of the first edition. Obvious typographical errors and errors of grammar and punctuation have been corrected, but no attempt has been made to standardize or modernize the text: the original punctuation, variants in capitalization (‘Lady’/‘lady’, for example) and variant spellings, including variants of proper names, have been retained. At times, therefore, the text will look strange to a modern reader. On several occasions, for example (mainly at the beginning of the third volume), ‘Philips’ appears as ‘Phillips’. More pervasively, the reader will be aware of different punctuation conventions: commas, for example, are typically placed between the subject and the predicate of a sentence (e.g., p. 85: ‘The happiness anticipated by Catherine and Lydia, depended less on any single event…’), or at the end of phrases not preceded by a comma (e.g., p. 86: ‘a ball was at any rate, a ball’); parenthetical phrases or clauses are often introduced with a dash and closed with a comma (e.g., p. 316: ‘Her astonishment at his coming—at his coming to Netherfield, to Longbourn, and voluntarily seeking her again, was almost equal…’).

The paragraphing error which Austen noted and two similar cases have been corrected. These, and most of the other emendations, follow Chapman’s edition, though I have not adopted all of Chapman’s changes to the text. I have, however, adopted two of the five emendations made in Cassandra Austen’s copy of the first edition of the novel, which came to light in 1937; the other three are described in notes to the appropriate passage. All substantive alterations are detailed in ‘Emendations to the Text’ (p. 409).

Chapman, R. W. (ed.),
Pride and Prejudice
, vol. II of
The Novels of Jane Austen
, 5 vols. (1923); 3rd edition (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1965)

Jane Austen’s Letters
, collected and edited by Deirdre Le Faye, 3rd edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

1.
Letters
, p. 197.

2.
Ibid., pp. 201–2.

3.
Ibid., p. 203.

4.
Chapman, p. xii.

PRIDE

AND

PREJUDICE:

A NOVEL.

IN THREE VOLUMES
.

BY THE

AUTHOR OF “SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.”

VOL. I.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR T. EGERTON,

MILITARY LIBRARY, WHITEHALL.

1819.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

“Do not you want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.

“
You
want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

This was invitation enough.

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four
¹
to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas,
²
and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

“What is his name?”

“Bingley.”

“Is he married or single?”

“Oh! single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

“How so? how can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

“Design! nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he
may
fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes.”