Pride and Prejudice

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Pride and Prejudice
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(No Transcript)
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Brief Life Story

• Jane Austen(1775-1817) was born in Steventon,
  Hampshire, where her father, Rev. George Austen,
  was a rector. She was the second daughter and
  seventh child in a family of eight.
• The first 25 years of her life Jane spent in
  Hampshire. On her father's unexpected retirement,
  the family sold off everything, including Jane's
  piano, and moved to Bath. Jane, aged twenty-five,
  and Cassandra, her elder sister, aged
  twenty-eight, were considered by contemporary
  standards confirmed old maid, and followed their
  parents.
• Jane was mostly tutored at home, but she
  received a broader education than many women of
  her time. She never married, but her social life
  was active and she had suitors and romantic
  dreams.
• Jane Austen started to write for family
  amusement as a child. Her earliest-known writings
  date from about 1787.Very shy about her writing,
  she wrote on small pieces of paper that she
  slipped under the desk plotter if anyone came
  into the room. Jane Austen's father supported his
  daughter's writing aspirations and tried to help
  her get a publisher.
• After her fathers death in 1805, she lived with
  her sister and hypochondriac mother in
  Southampton and moved in 1809 to a large cottage
  in the village of Chawton and remained there the
  rest of her life.

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Jane Austens House at Chawton
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Jane Austens Major Works(in order of
publication)

• Sense and Sensibility (1811)
• Pride and Prejudice (1813)
• Mansfield Park (1814)
• Emma (1816)
• Northanger Abbey (1818)
• Persuasion (1818)

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Britain in Austens Time

• Europe is submerged in warfare throughout most of
  the decade by the struggle against the ambitions
  of Napoleon to unite the continent under French
  rule. Two of Austens brothers, Frank and
  Charles, entered the British Navy and fought in
  the Napoleonic Wars.
• In the early 19th C, a womans education differed
  greatly from that of a man. While boys attended
  boarding schools and studied Latin, mathematics
  and science, girls were schooled at home by
  governesses, focusing on fine arts, writing,
  reading and sewing.

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Britain in Austens Time

• Because of a lack of professions for women to
  enter and become self-supporting, few women could
  afford to remain single in the early 1800s. Most
  women elected to marry rather than depend on
  other family members for financial support.
• The British Government maintained a strict
  control over any ideas or opinions that seemed to
  support the revolution in France. Prime Minister
  William Pitt suspended the right of habeas
  corpus, passed laws against public criticism of
  government policies and suppressed working-class
  trade unions. At the same time, the Industrial
  Revolution permanently changed the British
  economy.

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The Landed Gentry

• The Industrial Revolution also created a large
  wealthy class and an even larger middle class.
• These are the characters in Austens novels the
  landed gentry who have earned their property,
  not by inheriting it from their aristocratic
  ancestors, but by purchasing it with their new
  wealth.
• They have few of the manners and graces of the
  aristocracy and, like the Collinses, are
  primarily concerned with their own futures in
  their own little worlds.

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English Regency Society

• Because of periodic bouts of madness, King George
  III relinquished power to his son the Prince
  Regent.
• The Prince Regent was widely known as a man of
  dissolute morals, and his example was followed by
  many of societys leading figures.
• Young men regularly went to universities not to
  learn, but to see and be seen, to drink, gamble,
  race horses and spend money.
• George Wickham and Lydia Bennet are examples of
  the immoral behavior in Regency society.

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Pride and Prejudice

• First published in 1813, Pride and
  Prejudice has consistently been Jane Austen's
  most popular novel. It portrays life in the
  genteel rural society of the day, and tells of
  the initial misunderstandings and later mutual
  enlightenment between Elizabeth Bennet (whose
  liveliness and quick wit have often attracted
  readers) and the haughty Darcy. The title Pride
  and Prejudice refers (among other things) to the
  ways in which Elizabeth and Darcy first view each
  other. The original version of the novel was
  written in 1796-1797 under the title First
  Impressions, and was probably in the form of an
  exchange of letters.

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Comment on the opening sentence of the novelIt
is a truth universally acknowledged ,that a
single man in possession of a good fortune must
be in want of a wife.

• It briskly introduces the arrival of Mr. Bingley
  at Netherfield Park, the event that sets the
  novel in motion
• This sentence also offers a miniature sketch of
  the entire plot, which concerns itself with the
  pursuit of single men in possession of a good
  fortune by various female characters. The
  preoccupation with socially advantageous marriage
  in the 19th century England society manifests
  itself here, because in claiming that a single
  man in possession of a good fortune must be in
  want of a wife, the narrator reveals that the
  reverse is also true a single woman, whose
  socially prescribed options are quite limited, is
  in ( perhaps desperate ) want of a husband.
• Rhetorically speaking, the sentence is an irony.
  There is an ironic difference between the formal
  manner of the statement and the ultimate meaning
  of the sentence.