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    Pride and Prejudice (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Pride and Prejudice (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Pride and Prejudice (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Ebook177 pages1 hour

    Pride and Prejudice (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

    By William Blanchard

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    About this ebook

    REA's MAXnotes for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResearch & Education Association
    Release dateJan 1, 2013
    ISBN9780738673035
    Pride and Prejudice (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

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      Book preview

      Pride and Prejudice (MAXNotes Literature Guides) - William Blanchard

      Bourgh

      SECTION ONE

      Introduction

      The Life and Work of Jane Austen

      Jane Austen, the daughter of an English clergyman, was born in 1775 at her father’s Hampshire Vicarage in South Central England. Austen had six brothers and one sister. Austen and her sister, Cassandra, were inseparable. After several attempts to find an appropriate boarding school, they were schooled at home. Their father taught his own children and several who boarded with the family. This education was by extensive reading of the classics. Both sisters were pretty and popular, and they enjoyed most of the social amenities portrayed in Austen’s novels.

      By the time she was in her mid-twenties, Jane’s brothers, two of whom later became admirals, had careers and families of their own. After the father’s death in 1805, the family lived temporarily in Southhampton before finally settling in Chawton.

      A lively and affectionate family circle and a network of friends provided a stimulated context for her writing. It was the world of landed gentry and the country clergy that she used in her novels.

      In the six novels published between 1811 and 1817, Austen revealed the possibilities of domestic literature. Her concentration on personality and character and the tensions between her heroines and their society make her works more closely related to the modern world than to the traditions of the eighteenth century. This modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style, helps to explain her continuing appeal to twentieth century readers.

      Northanger Abbey, a satire on the romances, was sold for ten pounds in 1803, but as it was not published, was bought back by members of the family It did not appear in print until after Austen’s death.

      Although her friends knew of her authorship, she received little recognition in her lifetime. She was quite aware of her special excellences and limitations, and often compared her style to that of a miniaturist painter. She ridiculed the silly, the affected, and the stupid, ranging in her satire from early, light portraiture to later, more scornful exposures.

      Austen published several minor works and five major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and posthumously, a collection of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (1818). Other minor works included Juenilia, the novel, Lady Susan, and the fragments: The Watsons and Sandition. Her name never appeared on her title pages, therefore, she received little recognition until after her death in 1817.

      Her comedies of manners depict the self-contained world of provincial ladies and gentlemen, and most of her works revolved around the delicate business of providing proper husbands and wives for marriageable offspring of the middle class. She is best remembered for her lively interplays of character, her meticulous care to style and plot, a sense of comic irony, and her moral firmness. The overall substance of this novel concerns a small section of society locked into a timeless present in which little will change. The people involved are fixed, and the routines and social rituals are predetermined. Money is a problem when it is short. Successful courtships lead to satisfactory marriages. For the first two volumes of the book, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are pre-judging and re-judging. It is a drama of insight that acts by revision and sees things as they really are and not what was presumed.

      There is a whole vocabulary connected with the processes of decision, conviction, and opinion. People’s varied and unstable judgments are exposed and analyzed. Opinions are constantly changing as characters’ behaviors appear in a different light. The need to be aware of the difference between appearance and reality is made clear throughout the novel.

      Austen writes about what she knows. Therefore, great areas of human experience are never mentioned. The male characters are not finely drawn. In contrast, the female characters are strong and stand out as intelligent and complex individuals. Extreme passions are avoided. This is demonstrated when Elizabeth accepts Darcy’s second proposal. She says, My sentiments have undergone such a material change as to make me receive with gratitude and pleasure your present assurances. There seem to be many important topics which Austen avoided.

      Her greatest talents were her subtle insight into character and her precise dialogue. Each character’s speech is appropriate. Collins is pompous, Mr. Bennet is cynical and sarcastic, Elizabeth is forthright and honest, Lydia is frothy and giddy, and Darcy is sensitive and sure of himself.

      Although Romanticism was at its peak during Austen’s life, she rejected this movement. She adhered more closely to the neo-classic style, and to its discipline, devoid of passion. Her style emphasizes plots that turn like gears on the intricacies of character interaction. Her work is often satiric but underlined with moral purport. She seemed to observe human conduct with an amused and good-humored consciousness.

      She once compared her writing style to that of a painter whose subjects are miniatures. This is particularly true of her immaculate attention to detail. She was a perfectionist, and re-wrote most of her novels at least twice.

      Jane Austen died at the height of her creative potential at the age of 42. Researchers have suggested the cause to be either Addison’s disease or tuberculosis. She spent the last weeks of her life in Winchester, Hampshire in South England and is buried

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