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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility & Pride and Prejudice' is a masterpiece of English literature that intricately weaves together themes of societal expectations, class distinctions, and the complexities of love and relationships. The novel is written in Austen's signature style, characterized by wit, irony, and insightful social commentary. 'Sense and Sensibility' follows the Dashwood sisters as they navigate the rigid social norms of early 19th-century England, while 'Pride and Prejudice' tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy as they overcome their initial misunderstandings to find true love. These timeless classics continue to resonate with readers today, offering a window into the manners and mores of Austen's time. Jane Austen's keen observations of human nature and her skillful storytelling make 'Sense and Sensibility & Pride and Prejudice' essential reading for anyone interested in the art of the novel and the complexities of human relationships. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Pride and Prejudice & Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility & Pride and Prejudice
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection brings together Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), presented in their entirety. Its purpose is to offer readers a coherent view of Austen’s early maturity as a novelist, when she refined the social comedy and moral insight that have come to define her work. Placing the two novels side by side allows their complementary designs to be read in dialogue: the testing of reason and feeling alongside the testing of judgment and bias. The collection invites close attention to recurring motifs, to variations of tone, and to Austen’s evolving command of character, setting, and narrative form.
In scope, the contents are two complete novels, not a miscellany of letters, juvenilia, or essays. They represent the novel of manners at the turn of the nineteenth century: domestic in scale, exact in observation, and shaped by courtship plots within provincial communities. Within these narratives, Austen’s art draws on elements commonly associated with comedy, satire, and romantic fiction. The works are organized into concise chapters that sustain momentum through dialogue, scene, and carefully modulated narration. Read together, the novels display how a single genre can accommodate contrasting emphases—one inclined toward ethical tempering, the other toward the recalibration of first impressions—without relinquishing structural clarity.
Sense and Sensibility follows the Dashwood family after a change in circumstances forces a move from a comfortable estate to a more modest home. The two elder sisters, Elinor and Marianne, navigate new surroundings, attentions, and disappointments, while their mother sustains a household on limited means. The novel’s premise turns on how different temperaments meet similar tests: how prudence or ardor governs conduct, and how social expectations intersect with private desires. The constraints of inheritance and income shape every choice, yet Austen’s focus remains human rather than schematic, tracing how affection, loyalty, and forbearance can be steadied—or unsettled—by reason and emotion.
Pride and Prejudice centers on the Bennet family, whose five daughters face uncertain prospects because the family estate is entailed away from the female line. The arrival of new neighbors of fortune, accompanied by an aloof gentleman and other acquaintances, unsettles local sociability and provokes swift judgments. The novel begins from the combustible mix of wit, pride, and partial information that governs first meetings and public opinion. As acquaintances deepen, the story examines how perceptions are formed, revised, and sometimes stubbornly defended. The premise is not a catalogue of misalliance but a study in recognition: what it takes to see others—and oneself—more truly.
Considered together, the novels share a preoccupation with family ties, the economics of marriage, and the delicate calibration of character. They attend closely to the ties between money and manners, status and self-respect, property and personal freedom. Each tests a heroine’s judgment against a field of competing claims—parental influence, community opinion, personal inclination, and moral principle. Yet the unifying theme is larger than courtship. Austen probes how habits of mind become moral choices: how to govern feeling without deadening it, and how to correct pride without surrendering dignity. The social world is the laboratory; the experiment concerns the formation of character.
A hallmark of Austen’s style is her deft use of free indirect discourse, a narrative technique that blends a character’s thoughts with third-person narration. This allows irony to flourish without explicit authorial intrusion, and it situates readers inside shifting perspectives while preserving clarity. The prose is economical, the dialogue exact, and the comedy sharpened by understatement. Scenes move through carefully staged conversation, where manners become actions and tone carries argument. Even minor characters are etched with efficiency, their verbal tics revealing their values. Across both novels, humor never distracts from ethical inquiry; instead, it enables it, making reflection pleasurable and precise.
The social and legal backdrop is that of the English landed gentry in the early nineteenth century, where inheritance arrangements and limited female fortunes shaped possibilities. In this context, marriage functions as both personal commitment and financial negotiation. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 anonymously, credited simply to a lady; Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813, identified only as by the author of Sense and Sensibility. These publication circumstances signal both modesty and tactical clarity, locating the novels within contemporary expectations while allowing the work to speak for itself. The enduring result is fiction that is intimate in scale yet publicly resonant.
Across both novels, Austen constructs communities dense with visits, letters, dinners, and assemblies, where conversation is an event and the smallest inflection matters. Public scenes are balanced by domestic interiors in which characters read, reflect, and confide. Letters appear within the stories not as ornament but as instruments of plot and character, extending the range of voice and perspective. The pacing alternates between quick social currents and slower moments of appraisal. This architecture serves a consistent aim: to test private motives in public settings, and to let the common materials of daily life carry the weight of comedy, critique, and recognition.
Ethically, the novels respect the difficulty of judgment. Errors arise not merely from malice or vanity, but from partial information, family loyalty, haste, or wishful thinking. Austen’s comedy exposes pretension and folly, yet it stops short of cruelty, preferring correction to humiliation. Her characters are not abstract types; they are situated persons shaped by education, habit, and circumstance. The narration refrains from sermonizing, allowing readers to weigh conduct by observing its consequences in conversation, reputation, and self-understanding. In this balance of sympathy and scrutiny lies much of the work’s enduring appeal, and its capacity to instruct without presuming to lecture.
Reading the two books together clarifies their contrasts as well as their continuities. Sense and Sensibility is anchored in the complementary dispositions of two sisters and the trials they encounter after a reduction in fortune. Pride and Prejudice widens the canvas to a household of five daughters and an expanding social circle, where initial impressions mislead and must be re-evaluated. Each draws energy from ensemble scenes and from the vividness of a central heroine. Each also refines a particular question: what we owe to rational self-command, and what we owe to honest revision of belief. Taken together, they dramatize moral growth without melodrama.
In literary history, these novels occupy a pivotal place in the development of the English novel. Their mixture of social exactness, psychological nuance, and formal economy has influenced readers, writers, and critics for generations. One measure of their significance is the regularity with which they sustain fresh interpretation: questions of class, gender, property, and language find precise expression in their pages without reducing them to treatises. The prose remains accessible yet layered, its irony both invitation and test. That durability reflects an artistic equilibrium—between affection and analysis, laughter and inquiry—that few works maintain with such consistency.
This collection presents the complete texts together so that their conversation can be heard clearly: two early nineteenth-century comedies of manners that are also rigorous studies of perception, conduct, and community. It aims to facilitate attentive reading rather than to impose a thesis, trusting Austen’s craft to yield its own conclusions. Whether approached for the first time or returned to after many readings, these novels reward patience with exact pleasures: strong scenes, memorable voices, and an unwavering interest in how people come to know themselves and others. Their wit endures; so does their seriousness about the shape of a good life.
Author Biography
Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose incisive comedies of manners reshaped the novel at the turn of the nineteenth century. Writing in the decades spanning the late Georgian and Regency eras, she focused on courtship, money, rank, and the everyday negotiations of character within provincial communities. Her works, published initially without her name, combined wit and moral scrutiny with a controlled realism that continues to engage readers and scholars. Though her social canvas appears narrow, the precision of her dialogue, structure, and irony opened new possibilities for fiction, influencing narrative technique and establishing a durable standard for portraying domestic life and ethical choice.
Raised in Hampshire, Austen received a mixed education that included brief periods at boarding schools and extensive reading at home. She read widely in eighteenth‑century fiction and periodicals, absorbing the comic and sentimental traditions of authors such as Frances Burney, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, along with stage comedy and moral essays. The circulating‑library culture of her youth broadened her sense of contemporary taste, from Gothic romances to conduct literature. These influences appear in her juvenilia and mature work alike, where parody and pastiche temper affection for the forms she inherits. Her disciplined attention to narrative form reflects both habitual reading and continuous practice.
By her teens, Austen was composing lively juvenilia—short pieces, sketches, and burlesques that experiment with voice and genre. In the 1790s she wrote the epistolary novella Lady Susan, a pointed study of manipulation and social maneuvering. She also drafted early versions of later novels: Elinor and Marianne, First Impressions, and Susan, which she revised over subsequent years into Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey. These manuscripts display her evolving control over plot, dialogue, and point of view, and her shift away from pure epistolary form toward the more flexible third‑person narration that would become one of her hallmarks.
Austen’s publishing career began in 1811 with Sense and Sensibility, issued anonymously as “By a Lady.” Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, and Emma in 1815, each extending her reputation for finely judged social comedy. Reviewers noted her realism and moral tact, while her readership grew through editions that reached an expanding market for novels. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared posthumously in 1817, accompanied by a biographical notice that publicly identified her as the author. Although her earnings and fame in life were modest, her novels steadily found new admirers, laying the groundwork for a lasting critical reception.
Austen’s art rests on exact observation, tonal irony, and what later critics call free indirect discourse—the blending of a character’s idiom with third‑person narration. This technique allows sympathetic scrutiny of motives, illusions, and self‑correction, while preserving a cool authorial distance. Recurrent concerns include the pressures of inheritance and property, the constraints on women’s choices, the ethics of prudence and feeling, and the ways conversation reveals character. Her plots center on courtship and marriage without reducing them to romantic wish‑fulfillment, emphasizing practical consequences and moral growth. She pairs comic exposure of vanity with an insistence on humane judgment, sustaining both delight and critique.
After settling again in Hampshire, Austen revised earlier drafts and produced new work with steady discipline. Continued writing in the mid‑1810s coincided with periods of declining health, yet she completed Persuasion and prepared other material for publication. She also left fragments, including The Watsons and Sanditon, which sketch different social settings and narrative possibilities. Her final manuscripts confirm the same structural clarity and controlled humor that mark her best‑known novels. In July 1817 she died in Winchester, where she had sought medical care. Her burial in Winchester Cathedral and the posthumous acknowledgment of her authorship secured a public place for her work.
Austen’s legacy has grown across two centuries through scholarship, popular readership, and adaptation. Nineteenth‑century admirers preserved and promoted her reputation; twentieth‑century critics recognized her technical innovation and historical acuity; and contemporary culture continues to reinterpret her fiction on stage and screen. Readers return to her for the pleasures of style, dialogue, and moral intelligence, as well as for the steady interest she takes in ordinary life. Her novels remain central to discussions of narrative perspective, gender and economics, and the social imagination of the period. They endure not only as period portraits but as living works of art, endlessly discussable and re-readable.
Historical Context
Jane Austen wrote during the late Georgian and early Regency periods in Britain, a span marked by war abroad and gradual social transformation at home. Born in 1775 and dying in 1817, she drafted early versions of both novels in the 1790s and published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 and Pride and Prejudice in 1813. Their settings reflect southern and midland England’s landed-gentry world, where family position, income, and reputation govern opportunity. Austen’s career unfolded as fiction by women gained visibility yet was often published anonymously; Sense and Sensibility appeared “By a Lady,” signaling both propriety and the growing commercial space for female-authored domestic narratives.
The French Revolution (1789) and the Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) formed the geopolitical backdrop for Austen’s adulthood. Britain’s protracted conflict shaped everyday life through taxation, anxieties over invasion, and the mobilization of militia regiments posted in provincial towns. Pride and Prejudice notably includes a local militia presence, a realistic detail in wartime England. The formal Regency began in 1811 when the Prince of Wales assumed rule during George III’s illness, coinciding with Austen’s first publication. Although international politics remain largely offstage, the novels assume a society under pressure to preserve order, hierarchy, and propriety amid uncertainty.
Both works depict the English landed gentry, a stratum below the titled aristocracy yet above farmers and most tradespeople. Status derived from landownership, but the period saw wealth from commerce, banking, and professional work enter gentry circles. Austen’s characters navigate this shifting social map, where renting a great house, purchasing an estate, or possessing a substantial income could grant entry to genteel society. The novels register tensions between birth and merit, long-established families and “new money,” and the polite codes required to manage encounters in assembly rooms, dining parlors, and drawing rooms across town and country.
Inheritance law—including primogeniture and entails—shaped family fortunes and women’s prospects. Entails restricted estates to male heirs to keep property intact, often displacing daughters and widows into precarious dependence. Both novels reflect these realities by showing how marriage settlements, dowries, and provident management substitute for secure legal claims. Under coverture, a married woman’s property typically came under her husband’s control unless protected by settlement. Such legal norms make courtship consequential: choosing a spouse affects economic survival, social standing, and the security of extended kin networks that rely on rents, annuities, and carefully negotiated allowances.
The Church of England was a central institution of local governance and social order, and its clergy appear throughout Austen’s fiction. Parish livings—sources of clerical income—were often in the gift of local patrons, intertwining religion with patronage and class. Sense and Sensibility turns on the practical implications of obtaining a living, while Pride and Prejudice satirizes clerical obsequiousness and punctilious etiquette. Austen’s readers would have recognized the commonplace negotiation between vocation and livelihood, as well as the clerical household’s role in education, charity, and parish administration within rural communities.
Money talk in the novels reflects contemporary financial culture. Incomes are quoted annually, and investments in government securities—such as the widely held three-percent Consols—were common among the gentry. The long war strained public finances and dampened some landed incomes, while fortunes made in trade or banking rose in prominence. Austen’s worlds contain both established landowners and families enriched by commerce, signaling Britain’s broadening economic base. Renting large houses or purchasing smaller estates with liquid capital illustrates the growing permeability between mercantile wealth and genteel status, even as some characters preserve distinctions between land and trade.
Urban-rural circulation structures social life in both novels. London functioned as the hub of fashion, shopping, legal business, and winter society; visits there confer visibility and opportunities but also risk costly display. Provincial towns hosted assemblies and public balls that knit county society together. Improvements in roads via turnpike trusts and coaching networks made travel between counties and the capital more feasible, supporting the “season” calendars that organized calling, card-parties, and attendances at concerts and private dances—key spaces where reputations formed and marriage prospects were assessed under close communal scrutiny.
Sense and Sensibility engages with the eighteenth-century discourse of “sensibility,” a cultural movement valuing refined feeling and moral sympathy that had, by the 1790s, drawn criticism for excess. Conduct books and sermons urged restraint, prudence, and self-command—advice echoed in the period’s polite culture. Austen’s novel counterbalances the language of feeling with the claims of judgment, reflecting debates shaped by writers from Samuel Richardson to Frances Burney. Pride and Prejudice, though differently framed, likewise explores the pitfalls of self-deception and hasty judgment, placing manners and moral discernment at the center of social interaction.
The education of genteel women emphasized “accomplishments” useful in polite company—music, drawing, modern languages, needlework—more than professional training. Such skills featured at musicales and evening gatherings, signaling cultivation and family investment. Debates over women’s education, sharpened by works like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), questioned whether accomplishments fostered substance or merely display. Austen’s characters encounter this debate in practice as they weigh conversation, reading, and practical capability against ornament, showing how education became a test of judgment, taste, and long-term fitness for household management and sociability.
Landscapes and houses in these novels resonate with contemporary aesthetics. The picturesque movement—popularized by writers such as William Gilpin—encouraged touring and the appreciation of varied scenery, while landscape gardening by figures like Capability Brown and Humphry Repton reshaped estates. Austen’s descriptive economy lets readers infer temperament and values from settings and improvements: a well-situated estate, thoughtful planting, and proportionate elegance imply stewardship and taste. Visiting grand houses and exploring grounds became social rituals that revealed class markers, hospitality practices, and the subtle correspondence between moral character and material arrangement.
Letter writing knits plots and communities together, mirroring a society dependent on correspondence for news, courtship, and business. Postage in Austen’s day was charged by distance and the number of sheets, encouraging concise, strategic writing; members of Parliament could frank letters, reducing costs for acquaintances. Circulating libraries and subscription reading rooms expanded access to books and periodicals, fueling debates over the moral influence of novels. Austen draws on these networks: letters precipitate turning points, public rooms disseminate gossip, and reading practices—from sermons like James Fordyce’s to popular fiction—shape expectations of behavior.
Rural England in these works coexists with economic change. Enclosure acts, proceeding through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, consolidated open fields and commons, intensifying agricultural management and altering village life. While not directly dramatized, the logic of “improvement” pervades gentry discourse, linking estate efficiency to virtue. Hunting, tenant relations, and stewardship decisions frame a moralized economy in which landlords are judged by care for dependents as much as by display. The novels’ focus on households and parishes rests on this wider context of agrarian restructuring and debates over obligations within a hierarchical yet interdependent countryside.
Reputation functioned as social capital, particularly for women within a system offering few legal remedies for seduction or breach of promise. Guardianship norms, chaperonage, and vigilant gossip aimed to prevent scandals that could endanger entire families’ prospects. The militia’s presence in Pride and Prejudice underscores anxieties over uniformed visitors and flirtation, while Sense and Sensibility shows the risks of misread intentions in a tightly surveilled society. Defamation laws existed, but the swift economy of rumor often outpaced formal recourse, making prudence, reliable character witnesses, and strategic silence essential to maintaining standing.
Austen’s publication history illuminates the period’s literary marketplace. Sense and Sensibility was published on commission by Thomas Egerton in 1811; Austen is recorded as clearing about £140 from the first edition. She sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice to Egerton for approximately £110; it appeared in 1813 and sold briskly. Both novels followed the prevailing three-volume format favored by circulating libraries. Austen’s anonymity (“By a Lady”) was common for women authors seeking respectability and market success. Her careful revisions from earlier drafts—Elinor and Marianne (c. 1795) and First Impressions (1796–97)—reflect a maturing response to changing tastes.
Austen’s family background furnished practical knowledge of the worlds she depicts. Her father and two brothers were Anglican clergymen at various times, and two other brothers, Francis and Charles, were officers in the Royal Navy, careers that inform her broader oeuvre. She lived mainly in rural Hampshire, with periods in Bath and Southampton, before settling in Chawton in 1809, where she revised and produced her published novels. This proximity to parsonages, gentry houses, and provincial towns lends accuracy to her portrayals of visiting customs, parish obligations, and the delicate interplay of local influence and personal merit.
Contemporaries read Austen as refined domestic satire rather than as overt political commentary, yet early responses praised her realism and exact knowledge of manners. Victorian readers often emphasized moral exemplarity and decorum. In the twentieth century, critics highlighted narrative irony, free indirect discourse, and subtle social critique, situating her within the history of the novel. Late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations for film and television broadened global audiences, prompting renewed attention to class, gender, and economic precarity in her work, as well as to the pleasures and constraints of romance conventions within historically specific social codes.
As a pair, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice map two facets of the same historical moment: the negotiation between feeling and judgment, and the recalibration of rank amid war, commerce, and legal constraint. They record provincial England’s institutions—parishes, assemblies, estates, and the marriage market—while registering metropolitan influences and national pressures. Later readers have found in them both the charm of comedy and a precise anatomy of limited choices, especially for women. Read together, the novels offer a sustained commentary on how character, conversation, and prudence steer lives within the early nineteenth-century British social order.
Synopsis (Selection)
Sense and Sensibility
After a family reversal, the Dashwood sisters—practical Elinor and impulsive Marianne—navigate love, money, and reputation in a society alert to every gesture. Their contrasting temperaments carry them through courtships, misunderstandings, and the pressures of secrecy and decorum. The novel blends irony with empathy, weighing reason against feeling while exposing the economic constraints shaping women’s choices.
Pride and Prejudice
In a landscape of entailed estates and lively assemblies, Elizabeth Bennet’s quick wit meets Mr. Darcy’s reserve, and first impressions harden into misjudgments that ripple through families and communities. Proposals, social embarrassments, and shifting alliances test pride and the capacity for self-knowledge. With brisk satire and humane insight, the novel showcases class tensions, the marriage market, and the rewards of clearer judgment.
Sense and Sensibility & Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice
CHAPTER ONE
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 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 you not 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 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, 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.”
“I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go, or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better, for as you are as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley may like you the best of the party.”
“My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.”
“In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of.”
“But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when he comes into the neighbourhood.”
“It is more than I engage for, I assure you.”
“But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go, merely on that account, for in general, you know, they visit no newcomers. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to visit him if you do not.”
“You are over-scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls; though I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy.”
“I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so goodhumoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference.”
“They have none of them much to recommend them,” replied he; “they are all silly and ignorant like other girls; but Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters.”
“Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves.”
“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.”
“Ah, you do not know what I suffer.”
“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.”
“It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since you will not visit them.”
“Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will visit them all.”
Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.
CHAPTER TWO
Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He had always intended to visit him, though to the last always assuring his wife that he should not go; and till the evening after the visit was paid she had no knowledge of it. It was then disclosed in the following manner. Observing his second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly addressed her with:
“I hope Mr. Bingley will like it, Lizzy.”
“We are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes,” said her mother resentfully, “since we are not to visit.”
“But you forget, mamma,” said Elizabeth, “that we shall meet him at the assemblies, and that Mrs. Long promised to introduce him.”
“I do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two nieces of her own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her.”
“No more have I,” said Mr. Bennet; “and I am glad to find that you do not depend on her serving you.”
Mrs. Bennet deigned not to make any reply, but, unable to contain herself, began scolding one of her daughters.
“Don’t keep coughing so, Kitty, for Heaven’s sake! Have a little compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.”
“Kitty has no discretion in her coughs,” said her father; “she times them ill.”
“I do not cough for my own amusement,” replied Kitty fretfully. “When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?”
“Tomorrow fortnight.”
“Aye, so it is,” cried her mother, “and Mrs. Long does not come back till the day before; so it will be impossible for her to introduce him, for she will not know him herself.”
“Then, my dear, you may have the advantage of your friend, and introduce Mr. Bingley to her.”
“Impossible, Mr. Bennet, impossible, when I am not acquainted with him myself; how can you be so teasing?”
“I honour your circumspection. A fortnight’s acquaintance is certainly very little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight. But if we do not venture somebody else will; and after all, Mrs. Long and her daughters must stand their chance; and, therefore, as she will think it an act of kindness, if you decline the office, I will take it on myself.”
The girls stared at their father. Mrs. Bennet said only, “Nonsense, nonsense!”
“What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?” cried he. “Do you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you there. What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts.”
Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how.
“While Mary is adjusting her ideas,” he continued, “let us return to Mr. Bingley.”
“I am sick of Mr. Bingley,” cried his wife.
“I am sorry to hear that; but why did not you tell me that before? If I had known as much this morning I certainly would not have called on him. It is very unlucky; but as I have actually paid the visit, we cannot escape the acquaintance now.”
The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wished; that of Mrs. Bennet perhaps surpassing the rest; though, when the first tumult of joy was over, she began to declare that it was what she had expected all the while.
“How good it was in you, my dear Mr. Bennet! But I knew I should persuade you at last. I was sure you loved your girls too well to neglect such an acquaintance. Well, how pleased I am! and it is such a good joke, too, that you should have gone this morning and never said a word about it till now.”
“Now, Kitty, you may cough as much as you choose,” said Mr. Bennet; and, as he spoke, he left the room, fatigued with the raptures of his wife.
“What an excellent father you have, girls!” said she, when the door was shut. “I do not know how you will ever make him amends for his kindness; or me, either, for that matter. At our time of life it is not so pleasant, I can tell you, to be making new acquaintances every day; but for your sakes, we would do anything. Lydia, my love, though you are the youngest, I dare say Mr. Bingley will dance with you at the next ball.”
“Oh!” said Lydia stoutly, “I am not afraid; for though I am the youngest, I’m the tallest.”
The rest of the evening was spent in conjecturing how soon he would return Mr. Bennet’s visit, and determining when they should ask him to dinner.
CHAPTER THREE
Not all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her five daughters, could ask on the subject, was sufficient to draw from her husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley. They attacked him in various ways–with barefaced questions, ingenious suppositions, and distant surmises; but he eluded the skill of them all, and they were at last obliged to accept the second-hand intelligence of their neighbour, Lady Lucas. Her report was highly favourable. Sir William had been delighted with him. He was quite young, wonderfully handsome, extremely agreeable, and, to crown the whole, he meant to be at the next assembly with a large party. Nothing could be more delightful! To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love; and very lively hopes of Mr. Bingley’s heart were entertained.
“If I can but see one of my daughters happily settled at Netherfield,” said Mrs. Bennet to her husband, “and all the others equally well married, I shall have nothing to wish for.”
In a few days Mr. Bingley returned Mr. Bennet’s visit, and sat about ten minutes with him in his library. He had entertained hopes of being admitted to a sight of the young ladies, of whose beauty he had heard much; but he saw only the father. The ladies were somewhat more fortunate, for they had the advantage of ascertaining from an upper window that he wore a blue coat, and rode a black horse.
An invitation to dinner was soon afterwards dispatched; and already had Mrs. Bennet planned the courses that were to do credit to her housekeeping, when an answer arrived which deferred it all. Mr. Bingley was obliged to be in town the following day, and, consequently, unable to accept the honour of their invitation, etc. Mrs. Bennet was quite disconcerted. She could not imagine what business he could have in town so soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire; and she began to fear that he might be always flying about from one place to another, and never settled at Netherfield as he ought to be. Lady Lucas quieted her fears a little by starting the idea of his being gone to London only to get a large party for the ball; and a report soon followed that Mr. Bingley was to bring twelve ladies and seven gentlemen with him to the assembly. The girls grieved over such a number of ladies, but were comforted the day before the ball by hearing, that instead of twelve he brought only six with him from London–his five sisters and a cousin. And when the party entered the assembly room it consisted of only five altogether–Mr. Bingley, his two sisters, the husband of the eldest, and another young man.
Mr. Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His sisters were fine women, with an air of decided fashion. His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.
Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the principal people in the room; he was lively and unreserved, danced every dance, was angry that the ball closed so early, and talked of giving one himself at Netherfield. Such amiable qualities must speak for themselves. What a contrast between him and his friend! Mr. Darcy danced only once with Mrs. Hurst and once with Miss Bingley, declined being introduced to any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party. His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come there again. Amongst the most violent against him was Mrs. Bennet, whose dislike of his general behaviour was sharpened into particular resentment by his having slighted one of her daughters.
Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit down for two dances; and during part of that time, Mr. Darcy had been standing near enough for her to hear a conversation between him and Mr. Bingley, who came from the dance for a few minutes, to press his friend to join it.
“Come, Darcy,” said he, “I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance.”
“I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.”
“I would not be so fastidious as you are,” cried Mr. Bingley, “for a kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening; and there are several of them you see uncommonly pretty.”
“You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,” said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.
“Oh! She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.”
“Which do you mean?” and turning round he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said: “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.”
Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings toward him. She told the story, however, with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous.
The evening altogether passed off pleasantly to the whole family. Mrs. Bennet had seen her eldest daughter much admired by the Netherfield party. Mr. Bingley had danced with her twice, and she had been distinguished by his sisters. Jane was as much gratified by this as her mother could be, though in a quieter way. Elizabeth felt Jane’s pleasure. Mary had heard herself mentioned to Miss Bingley as the most accomplished girl in the neighbourhood; and Catherine and Lydia had been fortunate enough never to be without partners, which was all that they had yet learnt to care for at a ball. They returned, therefore, in good spirits to Longbourn, the village where they lived, and of which they were the principal inhabitants. They found Mr. Bennet still up. With a book he was regardless of time; and on the present occasion he had a good deal of curiosity as to the event of an evening which had raised such splendid expectations. He had rather hoped that his wife’s views on the stranger would be disappointed; but he soon found out that he had a different story to hear.
“Oh! My dear Mr. Bennet,” as she entered the room, “we have had a most delightful evening, a most excellent ball. I wish you had been there. Jane was so admired, nothing could be like it. Everybody said how well she looked; and Mr. Bingley thought her quite beautiful, and danced with her twice! Only think of that, my dear; he actually danced with her twice! And she was the only creature in the room that he asked a second time. First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so vexed to see him stand up with her! But, however, he did not admire her at all; indeed, nobody can, you know; and he seemed quite struck with Jane as she was going down the dance. So he inquired who she was, and got introduced, and asked her for the two next. Then the two third he danced with Miss King, and the two fourth with Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane again, and the two sixth with Lizzy, and the Boulanger–”
“If he had had any compassion for me,” cried her husband impatiently, “he would not have danced half so much! For God’s sake, say no more of his partners. O that he had sprained his ankle in the first dance!”
“Oh! My dear, I am quite delighted with him. He is so excessively handsome! And his sisters are charming women. I never in my life saw anything more elegant than their dresses. I dare say the lace upon Mrs. Hurst’s gown–”
Here she was interrupted again. Mr. Bennet protested against any description of finery. She was therefore obliged to seek another branch of the subject, and related, with much bitterness of spirit and some exaggeration, the shocking rudeness of Mr. Darcy.
“But I can assure you,” she added, “that Lizzy does not lose much by not suiting his fancy; for he is a most disagreeable, horrid man, not at all worth pleasing. So high and so conceited that there was no enduring him! He walked here, and he walked there, fancying himself so very great! Not handsome enough to dance with! I wish you had been there, my dear, to have given him one of your set-downs. I quite detest the man.”
CHAPTER FOUR
When Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in her praise of Mr. Bingley before, expressed to her sister just how very much she admired him.
“He is just what a young man ought to be,” said she, “sensible, goodhumoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners!–so much ease, with such perfect good breeding!”
“He is also handsome,” replied Elizabeth, “which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete.”
“I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second time. I did not expect such a compliment.”
“Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never. What could be more natural than his asking you again? He could not help seeing that you were about five times as pretty as every other woman in the room. No thanks to his gallantry for that. Well, he certainly is very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a stupider person.”
“Dear Lizzy!”
“Oh! You are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in your life.”
“I would not wish to be hasty in censuring anyone; but I always speak what I think.”
“I know you do; and it is that which makes the wonder. With your good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense of others! Affectation of candour is common enough–one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design–to take the good of everybody’s character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad–belongs to you alone. And so you like this man’s sisters, too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his.”
“Certainly not–at first. But they are very pleasing women when you converse with them. Miss Bingley is to live with her brother, and keep his house; and I am much mistaken if we shall not find a very charming neighbour in her.”
Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced; their behaviour at the assembly had not been calculated to please in general; and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and with a judgement too unassailed by any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve them. They were in fact very fine ladies; not deficient in good humour when they were pleased, nor in the power of making themselves agreeable when they chose it, but proud and conceited. They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town, had a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more than they ought, and of associating with people of rank, and were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable family in the north of England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than that their brother’s fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.
Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate, but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county; but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to purchase.
His sisters were anxious for his having an estate of his own; but, though he was now only established as a tenant, Miss Bingley was by no means unwilling to preside at his table–nor was Mrs. Hurst, who had married a man of more fashion than fortune, less disposed to consider his house as her home when it suited her. Mr. Bingley had not been of age two years, when he was tempted by an accidental recommendation to look at Netherfield House. He did look at it, and into it for half-an-hour–was pleased with the situation and the principal rooms, satisfied with what the owner said in its praise, and took it immediately.
Between him and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in spite of great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to Darcy by the easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper, though no disposition could offer a greater contrast to his own, and though with his own he never appeared dissatisfied. On the strength of Darcy’s regard, Bingley had the firmest reliance, and of his judgement the highest opinion. In understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means deficient, but Darcy was clever. He was at the same time haughty, reserved, and fastidious, and his manners, though well-bred, were not inviting. In that respect his friend had greatly the advantage. Bingley was sure of being liked wherever he appeared, Darcy was continually giving offense.
The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently characteristic. Bingley had never met with more pleasant people or prettier girls in his life; everybody had been most kind and attentive to him; there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and, as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.
Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so–but still they admired her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom they would not object to know more of. Miss Bennet was therefore established as a sweet girl, and their brother felt authorized by such commendation to think of her as he chose.
CHAPTER FIVE
Within a short walk of Longbourn lived a family with whom the Bennets were particularly intimate. Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune, and risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business, and to his residence in a small market town; and, in quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his own importance, and, unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James’s had made him courteous.
Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet. They had several children. The eldest of them, a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven, was Elizabeth’s intimate friend.
That the Miss Lucases and the Miss Bennets should meet to talk over a ball was absolutely necessary; and the morning after the assembly brought the former to Longbourn to hear and to communicate.
“You began the evening well, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Bennet with civil self-command to Miss Lucas. “You were Mr. Bingley’s first choice.”
“Yes; but he seemed to like his second better.”
“Oh! you mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her twice. To be sure that did seem as if he admired her–indeed I rather believe he did–I heard something about it–but I hardly know what–something about Mr. Robinson.”
“Perhaps you mean what I overheard between him and Mr. Robinson; did not I mention it to you? Mr. Robinson’s asking him how he liked our Meryton assemblies, and whether he did not think there were a great many pretty women in the room, and which he thought the prettiest? and his answering immediately to the last question: ‘Oh! the eldest Miss Bennet, beyond a doubt; there cannot be two opinions on that point.’”
“Upon my word! Well, that is very decided indeed–that does seem as if–but, however, it may all come to nothing, you know.”
“My overhearings were more to the purpose than yours, Eliza,” said Charlotte. “Mr. Darcy is not so well worth listening to as his friend, is he?–poor Eliza!–to be only just tolerable.”
“I beg you would not put it into Lizzy’s head to be vexed by his ill-treatment, for he is such a disagreeable man, that it would be quite a misfortune to be liked by him. Mrs. Long told me last night that he sat close to her for half-an-hour without once opening his lips.”
“Are you quite sure, ma’am?–is not there a little mistake?” said Jane. “I certainly saw Mr. Darcy speaking to her.”
“Aye–because she asked him at last how he liked Netherfield, and he could not help answering her; but she said he seemed quite angry at being spoke to.”
“Miss Bingley told me,” said Jane, “that he never speaks much, unless among his intimate acquaintances. With them he is remarkably agreeable.”
“I do not believe a word of it, my dear. If he had been so very agreeable, he would have talked to Mrs. Long. But I can guess how it was; everybody says that he is eat up with pride, and I dare say he had heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep a carriage, and had come to the ball in a hack chaise.”
“I do not mind his not talking to Mrs. Long,” said Miss Lucas, “but I wish he had danced with Eliza.”
“Another time, Lizzy,” said her mother, “I would not dance with him, if I were you.”
“I believe, ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.”
“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.”
“That is very true,” replied Elizabeth, “and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”
“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
“If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy,” cried a young Lucas, who came with his sisters, “I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine a day.”
“Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought,” said Mrs. Bennet; “and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle directly.”
The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she would, and the argument ended only with the visit.
CHAPTER SIX
The ladies of Longbourn soon waited on those of Netherfield. The visit was soon returned in due form. Miss Bennet’s pleasing manners grew on the goodwill of Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and though the mother was found to be intolerable, and the younger sisters not worth speaking to, a wish of being better acquainted with them was expressed towards the two eldest. By Jane, this attention was received with the greatest pleasure, but Elizabeth still saw superciliousness in their treatment of everybody, hardly excepting even her sister, and could not like them; though their kindness to Jane, such as it was, had a value as arising in all probability from the influence of their brother’s admiration. It was generally evident whenever they met, that he did admire her and to her it was equally evident that Jane was yielding to the preference which she had begun to entertain for him from the first, and was in a way to be very much in love; but she considered with pleasure that it was not likely to be discovered by the world in general, since Jane united, with great strength of feeling, a composure of temper and a uniform cheerfulness of manner which would guard her from the suspicions of the impertinent. She mentioned this to her friend Miss Lucas.
“It may perhaps be pleasant,” replied Charlotte, “to be able to impose on the public in such a case; but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely–a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a women had better show more affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.”
“But she does help him on, as much as her nature will allow. If I can perceive her regard for him, he must be a simpleton, indeed, not to discover it too.”
“Remember, Eliza, that he does not know Jane’s disposition as you do.”
“But if a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavour to conceal it, he must find it out.”
“Perhaps he must, if he sees enough of her. But, though Bingley and Jane meet tolerably often, it is never for many hours together; and, as they always see each other in large mixed parties, it is impossible that every moment should be employed in conversing together. Jane should therefore make the most of every half-hour in which she can command his attention. When she is secure of him, there will be more leisure for falling in love as much as she chooses.”
“Your plan is a good one,” replied Elizabeth, “where nothing is in question but the desire of being well married, and if I were determined to get a rich husband, or any husband, I dare say I should adopt it. But these are not Jane’s feelings; she is not acting by design. As yet, she cannot even be certain of the degree of her own regard nor of its reasonableness. She has known him only a fortnight. She danced four dances with him at Meryton; she saw him one morning at his own house, and has since dined with him in company four times. This is not quite enough to make her understand his character.”
“Not as you represent it. Had she merely dined with him, she might only have discovered whether he had a good appetite; but you must remember that four evenings have also been spent together–and four evenings may do a great deal.”
“Yes; these four evenings have enabled them to ascertain that they both like Vingt-un better than Commerce; but with respect to any other leading characteristic, I do not imagine that much has been unfolded.”
