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Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen, 1813

487 pages · 121,713 words · about 8 hours · regard 94 of 100

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Mrs. Bennet has five daughters and one ambition: get them married before the family estate passes to a distant male heir. When the wealthy Mr. Bingley arrives in the neighbourhood, he falls for the eldest, Jane — but it is his proud, reserved friend Mr. Darcy who captures the attention of the second, Elizabeth. She dislikes him on sight. He considers her family beneath him. Both are wrong about each other in ways that take the rest of the novel to correct. Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in the form of reported social life — visits, balls, letters, drawing-room conversations — and the plot turns almost entirely on what people say versus what they mean. The irony is structural: the novel's famous opening sentence announces that a rich man must want a wife, then spends 350 pages demonstrating that the sentence is, strictly speaking, nonsense. Elizabeth Bennet is one of the sharpest observers in English fiction, but the book is as much about the limits of her own perception as about the absurdities she skewers. The result is a novel that reads fast and rewards rereading. What appears to be a courtship comedy is also a precise study in how social pressure distorts judgment — and how two intelligent people can be badly wrong about each other for a long time before they see clearly.

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