Pride And Prejudice

1 Pages 307 Words

Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, along with several other texts, during the years of 1795 and 1799. It was then revised and edited by her and finally published in 1813. It is a widely read and well thought of novel. Versions of Austen's novel have been quite successfully adapted to film. Austen created characters who continue to seem believable, admirable, and with whom audiences can identify. Further, her themes of family, social stratification, and male-female interactions have universal appeal.

In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth and Jane Bennet are confronted with a difficult situation. Their financial futures are uncertain because of the way that property and land have been left to their father. This dilemma alters the way that their mother and other sisters begin to interact with the social world. It serves to propel the plot while also allowing Austen a tool for examining the social class structure and a patriarchal society.

Elizabeth's character is given depth through her relationship with Mr. Darcy. It is her "pride" and his "prejudice" at their first few encounters that temper their future while also inevitably causing them to fall in love with one another. Once again, Austen uses plot development to speak to larger issues. It is the pride of attitude and the prejudice against the lower classes that threaten these two would-be lovers. It asks a reader to reflect on his or her own "pride" or "prejudice" in a basic sense and perhaps even what those attitudes mean.

Through her text, Austen was able to criticize the way that economic and class stations restricted women. She was certainly conscious of the inevitability of class rigidity and indeed expected people to respect where they were in the class stratification. She faults characters when they try to move beyond their class, but also when they mistreat those of lower classes....