Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice, one of the world’s most popular novels, quickly establishes itself as a charming satire with its hilarious 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.”

Anthony Trollope once said of Jane Austen, “What she did, she did perfectly.” Today Austen is regarded as the first modern novelist. Pride and Prejudice—Austen’s own “darling child”—tells the story of fiercely independent Elizabeth Bennet, one of five sisters who must marry rich, as she confounds the arrogant, wealthy Mr. Darcy. What ensues is one of the most delightful and engrossingly readable courtships known to literature, replete with finely drawn depictions of country manners, high society and high comedy, and, ultimately, the economy-driven march toward marriage.

Written by a precocious Austen when she was just twenty-one years old, and filled with scintillating dialogue, Pride and Prejudice is, in the words of Eudora Welty, as “irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.”