Pride and Prejudice

‘It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. – I talked about the dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples’

With its ‘light and bright and sparkling’ dialogue, its romantic denouement and its lively heroine, Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most perennially popular novel. The love story of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, who misjudge, then challenge and change each other, is also a novel about the search for happiness and self-knowledge in a world of strict social rules, where a woman must marry well to survive.

This version of Pride and Prejudice is based on the first-edition text of 1813, as originally published.

Edited with an introduction and notes by VIVIEN JONES: University of Leeds