It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen’s most popular book.
Ok, it’s not actually universally acknowledged. I can already hear people screaming at the screen
saying ‘Don’t be stupid, you mean Sense and Sensibility, or Emma, etc’. It’s my favourite of
her books though and so today on History Calling we’re going to look at the history of Pride and
Prejudice. Now this isn’t a literary channel, so although there are going to be plot spoilers and
I’ll be showing you some of the original reviews of the book, this isn’t a plot analysis of the
famous love story between Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, nor am I providing you with my review of
the book. Those videos are two a penny on YouTube and you can go look them up if you wish, but as an
historian, I’m interested in the story of how and when the book was written and published,
why it took so long to get from Austen’s pen to the wider world, how much money she made
from it and what the early reviewers (who didn’t know what a phenomenon the book would become),
thought of it. As well as the book, we’ll also look at the more modern history of the story
via some of the many screen adaptations of it and the other stories which have been based on it
(so prepare to hear about Bridget Jones, some zombies and a murder at Pemberley).
In fact if you want to look in the description box below, I’ve put together links to a whole host of
Pride and Prejudice related books, movies and TV shows for you which should hold you through a long
weekend binge if you want them to. The book I’ve found most useful when researching this
video is The Cambridge Companion to 'Pride and Prejudice’ edited by Janet Todd. For now though,
let’s go back to the 1790s and to the birth of this classic work of English literature.
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Jane Austen was born in 1775 in the rectory of Steventon in Hampshire, the daughter of
the Reverend George Austen and his wife, the former Cassandra Leigh. She had six brothers
and one sister, also named Cassandra and for such a famous author, had a surprisingly small output.
She wrote only 6 full-length, completed and published books, two of which, Persuasion and
Northanger Abbey, were only released after her death in 1817, possibly of Addison’s disease.
In 1796, Jane had already been writing for several years and had produced early versions of two other
novels, which would become Sense and Sensibility and the short book, Lady Susan, not published
until the 1870s. That October (according to information later supplied by her sister),
she began work on a manuscript she called First Impressions, but which would later be
renamed Pride and Prejudice. It was completed in August 1797 and read out to family members
and close friends. Unfortunately, we know very little about Jane’s writing process as there are
virtually no surviving original manuscripts for her six published long novels and nothing for
Pride and Prejudice. One argument regarding its composition however, revolves around whether it
was originally intended to be a series of letters, rather than the narrative form it ended up in.
There is some confusion over whether it was this manuscript which was rejected
for publication by the firm of Cadell and Davies in November 1797. The letter which Jane’s father
sent to them enquiring whether they would be interested in the book didn’t mention it by name,
instead saying only that he had ‘a Manuscript Novel, comprised in three Vols. about the
length of Miss Burney's Evelina [which was another famous novel of this period]’. Some have therefore
wondered if this might have been the then titled Elinor and Marianne (later Sense and Sensibility).
The reasons why this firm rejected it are unknown, but Anthony Mandal (whose chapter is part of
aforementioned Cambridge Companion to 'Pride and Prejudice' which I’ve left linked below for you)
surmises that the way in which Austen’s father approached them was ‘clumsy and unbusinesslike,
requesting an immediate response regarding the terms under which they would publish
the (unseen) manuscript’. Whether this was First Impressions or not, it is certain that the story
of Darcy and Elizabeth would have a long wait before it would grace any public bookshelves,
as there is no evidence that either Austen or her father approached anyone else about releasing
it for many years after this, possibly feeling that a ‘lesser’ publisher was not good enough.
In the meantime, the manuscript was still circulated amongst Austen’s friends and family and
we get occasional glimpses of it in her letters. In 1799 she told her sister that ‘I do not wonder
at your wanting to read first impressions again, so seldom as you have gone through it, & that so
long ago'. In June 1800 she told Cassandra 'I would not let Martha [this was Martha Lloyd,
a close friend of the two sisters] read First Impressions again upon any account, & am very glad
that I did not leave it in your power. – She is very cunning, but I see through her design; – she
means to publish it from Memory, & one more perusal must enable her to do it’. An attempt
to get Lady Susan printed in 1803 failed and it was only in 1811 that Jane was at last published,
when Sense and Sensibility was released, though as you can see from the cover page of this
first edition, it was published anonymously, with the author listed simply as ‘A Lady’.
With this success under her belt, Austen now turned back to First Impressions.
It had apparently already undergone some changes in 1809-10, but other revisions were now made too.
The original title was dropped, as during the time since it had first been written,
another book, by author Margaret Holford had been published (in 1801),
entitled First Impressions, or, The Portrait. Jane now settled on Pride and Prejudice which
was likely inspired by Frances Burney’s book, Cecilia, which had been published in 1782 and
which includes the line ‘remember: if to pride and prejudice you owe your miseries, so wonderfully
is good and evil balanced, that to pride and prejudice you will also owe their termination’.
Other changes are less clear. Jane described in January 1813 how it had been ‘lopt & cropt
so successfully’ from what she had originally written over 15 years earlier, ‘that I imagine
it must be rather shorter than S. & S. [Sense and Sensibility] altogether’. R. W. Chapman argued
in 1965 that some of these changes must have occurred in the couple of years before publication
because the book uses the calendar of 1811-12, however Marilyn Butler, who wrote Jane’s Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography entry, states that others doubt that any serious revisions
could have occurred so late, especially as Jane was writing Mansfield Park by that point.
Austen devotees have been having fun ever since trying to guess what was omitted from the initial
version. Author Deirdre Le Faye speculated in a 2018 article in Notes and Queries that there
might originally have been some explanation as to how Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley knew each other
(their relative ages of 28 and 22 making a university friendship unlikely) and why Darcy was
in such a bad mood at the Meryton ball near the start of the novel, when he first meets Elizabeth.
Publication finally occurred in 1813 and again,
Jane’s authorship was hidden. This time she was credited as the ‘Author of Sense and Sensibility’.
The publisher was Thomas Egerton in London, who had also put out her earlier book.
She earned £110 for it (less than the £140 she got for Sense and Sensibility)
and had to give up the copyright for this payment. She later said that ‘I would rather have had £150,
but we could not both be pleased, & I am not at all surprised that he [meaning Egerton] should
not chuse to hazard so much’. It was sold for 18 shillings a copy. Converting old money into new is
notoriously difficult, however the National Archives’ currency converter estimates that
£110 at about that time would be equivalent to about £5117 in 2017 (which is the most recent
year it will convert to at the time this video is being made), while 18 shillings is about £42.
Austen was not particularly happy with the quality of the printing, complaining in a
letter to her sister that ‘The greatest blunder in the Printing that I have met with is in Page
220 – Vol. 3. [which I have onscreen for you here] where two speeches are made into one’.
This section of the book provides Jane and Elizabeth Bennet’s reactions to seeing Mr
Bingley again, upon his return to Meryton after a long absence and after disappointing Jane Bennet’s
hopes that he would propose to her. I have to admit I’m not sure what the conflated speeches
are though, as upon comparing this to my 2003 edition of the book, the text looks the same. It’s
always possible the error was never corrected, but let me know below if you can answer this.
The book was well received and was reviewed in three places;
the British Critic, the Critical Review and the New Review (though the latter just
provided a plot summary). You can see the Critical Review onscreen, which said of
the book that ‘the fair author of the present introduces us, at once, to a whole family, every
individual of which excites the interest, and very agreeably divides the attention of the reader.’
In between a summary of the plot, the anonymous reviewer went on to say that:
On the character of Elizabeth, the main interest of the novel depends; and the fair author has
shewn considerable ingenuity in the mode of bringing about the final eclaircissment between
her and Darcy. Elizabeth’s sense and conduct are of a superior order to those of the common
heroines of novels. From her independence of character, which is kept within the proper line
of decorum, and her well-timed sprightliness, she teaches the man of Family-Pride to know himself.
The reviewer concluded that Pride and Prejudice:
rises very superior to any novel we have lately met with in the delineation of domestic scenes.
Nor is there one character which appears flat, or obtrudes itself upon the notice
of the reader with troublesome impertinence. There is not one person in the drama with whom
we could readily dispense;—they have all their proper places; and fill their several stations,
with great credit to themselves, and much satisfaction to the reader.
The British Critic was similarly effusive on the whole, saying the book was:
Very far superior to almost all the publications of the kind which have lately come before us.
It has a very unexceptionable tendency, the story is well told, the characters remarkably
well drawn and supported, and written with great spirit as well as vigour.
The reviewer did sound one note of caution though and this criticism is one which has
also been levelled at the novel in the centuries since and that was that Darcy’s ‘easy unconcern
and fashionable indifference, somewhat abruptly changes to the ardent lover’.
Pride and Prejudice was out in the world at last then and its popularity and fascination
have grown exponentially since these first reviews.
The last part of this video is going to look at just a few of the adaptations, continuations and
re-imaginings of the story which have been written and filmed during the 20th and 21st centuries.
Of the various screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, I think that the three which are the
most famous are the 1940 movie starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, the 1995 BBC version
starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth and the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley and Matthew
Macfayden. All have treated the source material differently. In 1940, the story was condensed into
about 90 minutes, the costumes selected presented the events as occurring during the early Victorian
period, rather than either the 1790s when the book was written, or the 1810s when it was published
and (as Laura Carroll and John Wiltshire have noted), tonally it feels more like
the screwball comedies popular during the 40s than something which comes from Austen’s era.
Several changes to the characterisations and story points were made too. Mr Collins is now
a librarian and Lady Catherine De Burgh seeks only to test Elizabeth’s love for Darcy at the
end of the movie, rather than stifle it. The 1995 adaptation (my personal favourite I’ll admit),
benefits from having around 6 hours in which to tell the story, providing the most complete
rendering of it onscreen so far. The costumes, with the empire-cut waists on the ladies’ dresses
are now Regency era, in line with the publication date and it includes the infamous scene (not in
the book) of Darcy bumping into Elizabeth in the grounds of his home, Pemberley,
having just been for a dip in one of the nearby lakes (and just to clarify, they do
bump into each other in the book, but he is not soaking wet and hasn’t just been for a swim).
Director Joe Wright’s 2005 take on the story is what Carroll and Wiltshire call
‘the most alluringly romantic treatment the novel has received’, with the outfits now suggesting we
are back in the 1790s. The runtime of just over 2 hours is much less than what Colin Firth and
Jennifer Ehle had to play with, but most of the story is still there, though I admit that much
as I enjoy the movie (and I do), I recall that my first impression of it (no pun intended) was that
everyone was speaking very quickly, possibly to squeeze the script into the allotted time.
With the book long out of copyright and therefore free to be reused and altered,
other books and the TV shows or movies they become have brought about a proliferation of sequels,
modernisations and mash-ups. P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley for instance, is set a number
of years after Darcy and Elizabeth’s marriage and sees Wickham accused of murder. One of the most
famous retellings of the original story, moved to a 21st century setting, is Bridget Jones’s Diary,
where Bridget fills in for Elizabeth and meets her own Mr Darcy (played in the movies by Colin Firth,
who showed a great willingness to send himself and one of his most famous characters up – he
does it in St Trinian’s as well by the way, when he recreates the wet shirt scene).
In this case, Hugh Grant fills in for Mr Wickham and adds a little bit more Austen
to his own resume, as he was previously in a movie version of Sense and Sensibility.
The 2004 film, Bride and Prejudice, is an interesting example of how the story can appeal
to cultures and countries vastly different, not just in time, but also location, to that
originally intended by Austen, as it transposes the action to a Bollywood setting. America
loves Austen too and The Jane Austen Book Club contains a cast of characters living in the States
whose stories mirror many of Austen’s characters in her various books, not just those in Pride
and Prejudice. Here on YouTube there is also the channel The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which places
the story into a modern day context and plays it out in 100 short episodes released back in 2012.
In Lost in Austen, the main character actually finds herself transported inside the book,
replacing Elizabeth Bennet, who is dumped out into the 21st century. Needless to say, mayhem ensues.
Within the mash-up genre, one of the best known and bizarre is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,
which does exactly what the title suggests, whilst retaining much of Austen’s original text
and crediting her as a co-author. Wouldn’t we all love to know what she would have made of that?
These are just a few items from the absolute deluge of Pride
and Prejudice themed stories which continue to appear in all mediums,
from print to stage to screen and no doubt this deluge will continue for many years to come.
It demonstrates I think, that the life of this book is perhaps endless. Few fiction
writers have written works which have continued to be so popular and which so many generations
can see themselves and their experiences in. The history of Pride and Prejudice is far from over.
This video however, has now reached its conclusion and I hope you’ve enjoyed its little foray into
the world of Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. Let me know below which adaptation,
sequel, modernisation or mash-up of Pride and Prejudice is your favourite and don’t forget to
subscribe and check out the description box for links to all the books and screen adaptations
mentioned here. I’ll be back next week with a new video and until then, keep learning.