Pride and Prejudice Published: Austen's Masterpiece
Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice on January 28, 1813, under the anonymous attribution 'By the Author of Sense and Sensibility.' The novel sold out its first printing of roughly 1,500 copies within months. Austen received 110 pounds for the copyright, a fraction of what the book earned its publisher. The story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy established the template for romantic fiction that has never gone out of print. Austen wrote with a surgeon's precision, using irony and free indirect discourse to expose the economic desperation beneath polite society's veneer. Marriage in her world was not about love but survival: a woman without a husband and without money faced social ruin. The novel's famous opening line, 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,' inverts its own meaning. The truth is that women needed the fortune far more than men needed wives.
January 28, 1813
213 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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