Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Austen’s Literary Works
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Northanger Abbey (1818)
Mansfield Park (1813)
Emma (1815)
Persuasion (1818)

Austen’s Main Ideas
Austen’s main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. Austen shows a human being not at moments of crisis, but in the most trivial incidents of everyday life.
Austen is particularly preoccupied with the relationship between men and women in love. Stories of love and marriage provide the major themes in all her novels.
As in many of Austen’s other novels, irony is employed in Pride and Prejudice as the lens through which society and human nature are viewed. Through the novel, Austen studies social relationships in the limited society of a country neighbourhood and investigates them in detail with an often ironic and humorous eye.

Plot
Pride and Prejudice is a humorous story of love and life among English gentility during the Georgian era.
Mr Bennet is an English gentleman living in Hartfordshire with his overbearing wife. The Bennets 5 daughters; the beautiful Jane, the clever Elizabeth, the bookish Mary, the immature Kitty and the wild Lydia.
Unfortunately for the Bennets, if Mr Bennet dies their house will be inherited by a distant cousin whom they have never met, so the family's future happiness and security is dependent on the daughters making good marriages.
Life is uneventful until the arrival in the neighbourhood of the rich gentleman Mr Bingley, who rents a large house so he can spend the summer in the country. Mr Bingley brings with him his sister and the dashing (and richer) but proud Mr Darcy. Love is soon in the air for one of the Bennet sisters, while another may have jumped to a hasty prejudgment.
For the Bennet sisters many trials and tribulations stand between them and their happiness, including class, gossip and scandal.

Themes of the novel
Marriage serves many purposes and needs.
Appearances can be deceiving and first impressions are often wrong.
Pride makes one arrogant and insensitive.
The relationship between the individual and society.
The conflict between the individual’s desires and the individual’s responsibility to society.
The use that the individual makes of freedom and its
consequences.
The contrast between imagination and reason.
Love, courtship, and marriage.