Pride and Prejudice

I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry - Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennett is young, clever and attractive, but her mother is a nightmare and she and her four sisters are in dire need of financial security and escape in the shape of husbands. The arrival of nice Mr Bingley and arrogant Mr Darcy in the neighbourhood turns all their lives upside down in this witty drama of friendship, rivalry, enmity and love.

About the Author

Jane Austen's life was, on the surface, uneventful and serene, but her works reveal a mind of enormous vitality and scope, and a powerful understanding of human behavior. Bom on December 16,1775, in the Hampshire village of Steventon where her father was a rector, she grew up in a lively, affectionate family, who were (she recalled) "great novel- readers." In rural Hampshire, among the minor landed gentry and country clergy so perfectly portrayed in her work, she wrote and anonymously published SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1811), PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813), MANSFIELD PARK (1814), and EMMA (1816). She never married, and she ignored literary circles, ridiculing the popular Gothic novel and rejecting the tenets of Romanticism. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published after her death on July 18,1817. Jane Austen described her own writing as a "little bit of ivory" and maintained that "three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on." These self- deprecatory remarks understate the universality of her concerns and the largeness of her most prevalent theme: the need for men and women to find self- awareness and identity while accepting, out of necessity, the powerlessness and dependency which society so often confers upon them. Her flawless prose, displays such shrewd wit, delicate irony, and accomplished.