Pride and Prejudice

Packed with wit. – Helen Dunmore * Daily Express *The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist * Independent *The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste * Virginia Woolf *Like Irvine Welsh, I am a great admirer of Jane Austen – Alexander McCall SmithAnother question I’ve been regularly asked over the past year is what models I had in mind when writing Curious Incident. Was it To Kill a Mockingbird? Was it Catcher in the Rye? In fact, the book most often in my mind was Pride and Prejudice – Mark HaddonAn incredibly funny, very upmarket love story with an enchanting heroine and the perfect romantic hero: a tartar with a heart of gold – Jilly CooperThe Mozart opera of novels and again a transcendent union of structure and content in which unhappy marriage is the reward for those who show a weakness of character and lifelong happiness is a province reserved only for those “who truly know themselves” – Kate AtkinsonFor those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta Stone of literature – Anna QuindlenHow could these novels ever seem remote…the gaiety is unextinguished today, the irony has kept its bite, the reasoning is still sweet, the sparkle undiminished, as comedies they are irresistibly and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be – Eudora WeltyThat young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with – Sir Walter Scott

Jane Austen was born in Steventon rectory on 16 December 1775. Her family later moved to Bath, then to Southampton and finally to Chawton in Hampshire. She began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was twenty-two years old. It was originally called First Impressions and was initially rejected by the publishers and only published in 1813 after much revision. She published four of her novels in her lifetime, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were both published posthumously in 1818.

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