The Penguin Classics edition of Pride and Prejudice is the definitive version of Jane Austen's timeless novel of love's triumph over adversity, celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2013.
When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Mr Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Mr Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is a sparkling comedy of manners which explores the folly of judging by first impressions, and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life in early nineteenth-century England.
Edited with notes and an introduction by Vivien Jones, this edition also includes a new chronology, additional suggestions for further reading, and the original Penguin Classics introduction by Tony Tanner.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was extremely modest about her own genius but has become one of English literature's most famous women writers. Austen began writing at a young age, embarking on what is possibly her best-known work, Pride and Prejudice, at the age of 22. She was the author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey.
If you liked Pride and Prejudice, you may enjoy Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, also available in Penguin Classics.
'The most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal'
Virginia Woolf
'As nearly flawless as any fiction could be'
Eudora Welty
'Pride and Prejudice has always been the most popular of Jane Austen's books ... with its good humoured comedy, its sunny heroine, its dream denouement'
Claire Tomalin