Introduction

Sadie Stein opens with a confession. She first read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice at about 12, on top of a radiator one snowy weekend, in her mother's powder blue 1920s edition, and identified with Lizzy Bennet so completely that her email address was spinster4@aol.com. From there she turns to the author: a rector's daughter born in Hampshire in 1775, anonymous in print, paid 110 pounds for a novel that promptly sold out, dead at 41 with only 160 of some 3,000 letters surviving.

The useful part is the map. Stein names the themes she'll follow, love and marriage first, then class, money, the pressures of society and irony, and reads the famous opening line as Austen laying all of them out at once. She's frank about the detractors too; Mark Twain wanted to dig Austen up and beat her with her own shin bone. You leave with questions to carry into chapter one and a promise that this will run like a book group, at your own pace.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Sadie Stein. I'm a writer, editor, critic, and teacher, but above all, I'm a passionate reader. You've all heard of Pride and Prejudice. Maybe you've never read it, maybe you haven't read it in years, or maybe you reread it every year and have extremely strong feelings about every adaptation. For the record, in this reader's opinion, the 1995 BBC miniseries remains the gold standard.

Whatever your level of expertise or enthusiasm, there's always more to discover about Jane Austen's classic, and I'm so excited to read it with you. The term "great book" is thrown around a lot, but this is one that deserves it. It's funny, wise, profound, humane, and last but not least, invented the romantic comedy.

The first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I was probably 12. Secretly, I really identify with Lizzy Bennet, the clever if judgmental heroine who has to overcome her initial assumptions, even as her wit and unconventional beauty beget literature's most eligible bachelor. I doubt the rest of the world could see the striking resemblance. In reality, I was tiny, shy, in middle school, and had a bad habit of wearing shockingly unflattering, enormous 1940s house dresses. I mean, I was very judgmental. I was spinster4@aol.com. My closest friends and I formed a group called the Sisterhood of Chivalry, complete with a coat of arms, which we composed after an exhaustive independent study of heraldry. As you might imagine, we were wildly popular.

Pride and Prejudice was the first pick in the Sisterhood of Chivalry book club. Since we never got around to actually meeting, I ended up reading it on my own one snowy weekend, sitting on top of the radiator in my bedroom. The copy was my mother's, snagged from the dining room, a powder blue 1920s edition with watercolor illustrations. From the opening line, I was riveted, and that's not an exaggeration. The book was from 1813, but it spoke to me as an awkward tween in 1990s New York. More than that, I was lost in Austen's world. I went on to mainline all her books, but this remained my favorite. When we read it in senior year English class, my relative expertise was such that the teacher invited me to lead a class, which I did in a long skirt and heels from Payless, also excellent for popularity.

A few words now about our author. Considering how incredibly popular her six novels are, we know relatively little about Jane Austen's short life. That's not actually so shocking. She was a gentlewoman of her era whose personal correspondence hasn't all survived. From what scholars calculate, only 160 of 3,000 letters survive. Much of what we do know comes from letters to and from her sister Cassandra, who out of privacy destroyed most of them upon Jane's death at 41. The posthumous biographical sketches by family members and admirers were hagiographic or inaccurate. Ever since, script writers and fans have been filling in the gaps with love affairs, drama, and zombies.

Here's what we do know. Jane Austen was born in Hampshire in 1775 to a family of noble lineage and modest means. Her father, a younger son, was a rector. Jane was the youngest of seven. Although the children were raised in infancy by a nursemaid who lived nearby and a developmentally disabled brother was fostered out permanently, contemporary sources described the home as a lively and agreeable one. Finances were precarious. Their father boarded pupils, and Cassandra and Jane had a rather sporadic gentlewoman's education. However, the family read voraciously, wrote and performed private theatricals, and were all treated as intellectual equals by the Reverend Austen.

A prolific writer from childhood, Austen published Sense and Sensibility anonymously, on commission, that is to say, at her own risk, and after it took off, was paid 110 pounds for Pride and Prejudice. Original working title: First Impressions. It promptly sold out. By the end of the year, it had been translated into several languages and become a worldwide hit. Because her publication was anonymous, her quiet life as a genteel spinster did not change much to the outward eye. She continued to write, moved around the country a bit with her family, socialized with friends, and wrote three more novels. Her last few years, she was plagued by ill health. She died at 41. Contemporary authorities have diagnosed Addison's disease, although there are those who argue for lupus or poisoning. As with all things Austen, everyone has a theory.

Austen's work was certainly popular in her day, but although several contemporary critics noted the wit and observational acuity of Pride and Prejudice, it was definitely classed as women's novel. Reading was still considered basically frivolous. Austen herself described it in later life as lacking in gravitas, and even after her death, Pride and Prejudice was polarizing. Charlotte Brontë thought it was bloodless and overly polite. Mark Twain probably spoke for a lot of social realism lovers when he wrote, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig Austen up and beat her over the skull with her own shin bone." Sir Walter Scott liked it, and so did readers, even when the book wasn't considered fashionable: too romantic, not political enough. It was never out of print.

In the 20th century, Austen experienced a reevaluation, placing her rightly in the canon of great English novelists, but people who loved her books didn't need critical validation. The fact that British soldiers in their World War I bunkers talked about Pride and Prejudice to escape the horrors of war is at least as compelling an argument as Virginia Woolf's or a thousand adaptations. The novel is now the kind of iconic where the name Mr. Darcy barely means something even if you've never read the book. It's a part of our culture, and for good reason.

Let's turn to some of the primary themes of the book. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Is there a more iconic opening line in literature? And it's not just quotable. The author's laying out all the themes of the book: love and marriage, of course, but also class, money, the judgments and pressures of society, and irony. For the five Bennet sisters, marrying, and ideally marrying well, is not optional. Their family doesn't have the means to support all of them, but that of course is a catch-22. A suitor would have to be very wealthy to marry a woman without a dowry. Marriage is this novel's central preoccupation because for women of Austen's class it was, and in this novel, she explores all the different pressures at work: financial, social, and of course, emotional. Love is a luxury in this world, but when it happens, in spite of all the rules and barriers, it's all the more precious for the reader.

Questions of class and of money are inextricably tied to marriage. Jane Austen is often called a student of manners. The world she paints in Pride and Prejudice is small and specific, but you come away with an exact portrait of one provincial area, in the exact position everyone within it occupies. There are fancy people with no money, parvenus with no family, genteel poverty, squalid poverty, vulgarity, snobbery, social climbing, a lot of it, and the rare person who's rich, landed, noble, nice, and attractive. This is a society with rules and hierarchy. We see what happens when people break the rules. A little rebellion can be great. Too much is fatal. Why do we follow rules, Austen asks, and is it worth it?

Arguably, this is the most quietly revolutionary and perennial of themes. It's a book about women, how they're limited by their circumstances, but how they live within those limits. They have less autonomy, yes, but we see a world of sisters, of friends, that in the context of the book looks a lot less lonely than those of the men. We also see how the responsibilities of the hierarchy weigh on the male characters, from Mr. Bennet, whose life is dedicated to finding some kind of existence in a world where he's too rich to work and too poor to thrive, to Mr. Darcy, who, when he marries, has to consider the livelihoods of his many tenants. And of course, this is a book about feelings: pride and prejudice. Neither one is a total liability. Both, in all their many dimensions, have to be faced before anyone can find love.

These are just a few of the things we'll be talking about as we read Pride and Prejudice. For instance, that title: what does it mean? What's your first impression, and how does it change throughout the book? Which characters are guilty of pride or prejudice, and is it ever justified? How do these qualities help people exist in the world they inhabit? Austen's characters are complicated and multifaceted. What do you think of Elizabeth Bennet? Of Mr. Darcy? What about her parents and sisters? How do these feelings evolve throughout the novel? Do they change, or do our feelings? Keep a sharp eye out for class markers. How does Austen describe fashion, real estate, and other social distinctions? How seriously do the characters take them? Are they right? How much is real pragmatism? How much self-fulfilling?

What is Austen saying about the roles of men and women? What are the different roles or archetypes we see represented in the novel? Can you see things in this book that you recognize in contemporary fiction, films, or TV? Like what? This is very important. Do you enjoy reading the book? Why or why not? And of course, what do we think of the adaptations?

Think of this as a book group, and yes, I do realize that The Jane Austen Book Club is a thing. I am here to read with you, to point out things that strike me anew or that I've learned over many rereads, and hopefully to get you asking your own questions too. Above all, this should be fun, a way to get more out of the book. Everyone brings something new to everything they read. Sometimes just stopping to ask yourself a question helps me bring dimension to the experience. I'll provide a short commentary after each section of the book. I'll provide some context and mention a few things to look out for going forward. Think of it like a museum audio guide designed to help deepen the experience, but totally at your own pace. You can use this guide however you like, after each section or after those sections that really left you confused, engaged, or bored. And let's get started.