PDF EPUB} Blaine Josten's Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice by Blaine Josten 10 Surprising Facts About Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Blaine Josten's Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice by Blaine Josten 10 Surprising Facts About Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It’s a simple story: boy is rude to girl, girl dislikes boy. Boy proposes to girl and she refuses him. Later, she discovers that he’s stinking rich. Hijinks ensue. In the end, they are married in an ideal 19 th -century wedding of both love and money. Today, more than 200 years later, Pride and Prejudice remains Jane Austen’s most beloved novel. 1. Like her characters, Jane Austen was rejected for not being rich enough. Pride and Prejudice is about young women of genteel poverty trying to find good marriage matches. This issue must have been fresh on the young author’s mind when she wrote the book. At age 20, she had a flirtation with a young man named Tom Lefroy. Like a scene out of one of her novels, she flirted scandalously with him at a ball. “Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together,” she wrote to her sister Cassandra. “He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you.” But Austen’s social status wasn’t high enough and Lefroy’s family separated the two lovebirds. Lefroy was soon engaged to a woman with a large fortune. Austen wrote her sister: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy … My tears flow as I write this, at this melancholy idea." 2. Mr. Darcy would be the equivalent of a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt. The characters in Pride and Prejudice constantly exclaim over Mr. Darcy’s 10,000 pounds a year, but how rich is that exactly? In 2013, The Telegraph calculated that adjusting for financial changes, a decent estimate might be 12 million pounds, or $18.7 million U.S. dollars a year. And that’s just interest on top of a much larger fortune. It’s no wonder Mrs. Bennet gushed about Elizabeth’s engagement—"How rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have!" Marrying Darcy would be like marrying a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt. 3. Lydia Bennet elopes to the Las Vegas of her day. In the book, the Bennet family is almost ruined when Lydia elopes with the nefarious soldier George Wickham to Scotland. “I am going to Gretna Green,” Lydia writes to her friend, “and if you cannot guess with who, I shall think you a simpleton.” Unlike England, Scotland allowed people under 21 to get married without parental consent, and without the same legal and religious bureaucracy. Gretna Green was the first town over the Scottish border. There, a young couple could be joined with “marriage by declaration,” which often occurred in a blacksmith shop. 4. Like Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Jane Austen was close to her sister. In Pride and Prejudice , the relationship between the two sisters is central to the novel. In real life, Jane was very close to her sister Cassandra. They wrote each other almost every day when they were apart and would voluntarily share a bedroom, even when they could sleep separately. When Jane died, Cassandra wrote her niece: “She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow.” It’s no wonder that close sisters appear in so many of Austen’s novels. 5. One publisher rejected Pride and Prejudice without even reading it. Austen finished the book, then titled First Impressions , when she was 21 years old. In 1797, her father sent it to the publisher Thomas Cadell, writing that he had "a Manuscript Novel comprised in three Vols., about the length of Miss [Fanny] Burney's Evelina ." He asked how much it would cost him to publish the book and what Cadell would pay for copyright. In response, Cadell scrawled “Declined by Return of Post” on the letter and sent it back with insulting speed. The novel languished for 14 years until, flush with the success of Sense and Sensibility , Austen revised the manuscript. It was published in 1813 when she was 37 years old. 6. The book's title came from a Fanny Burney novel. Austen probably got the title Pride and Prejudice from Cecilia by Fanny Burney, where the phrase is repeated several times—and in block capitals, no less. “The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr. Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. … 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.” 7. Pride and Prejudice was published anonymously. Austen didn’t put her name on her novels, and would only say they were “By a Lady.” The title page of Pride and Prejudice said, “by the author of Sense and Sensibility .” It wasn’t until after her death that her brother revealed her name to the public. 8. Jane Austen that worried Pride and Prejudice was too frivolous. Because Pride and Prejudice humorously deals with women getting married, it’s often described as “chick lit,” a label some fans find reductionist. But Austen herself worried the book wasn’t serious enough. “The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling,” she wrote. “It wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had.” Overall, though, Austen was “well satisfied enough” with the novel, especially with the character of Elizabeth. In another letter, she said, “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least I do not know.” 9. Jane Austen sold her copyright to Pride and Prejudice for 110 pounds—but wanted 150. Austen sold the copyright for Pride and Prejudice to her publishers for 110 pounds, even though she said in a letter that she wanted 150 pounds. She chose this one-time payment, forfeiting any risk or reward connected to the future of the book. It was a bad gamble" The book was a bestseller, and was on its third printing by 1817. It has been in print ever since. 10. Pride and Prejudice has been adapted hundreds of times. The adaptations of Pride and Prejudice seem endless (and sometimes bizarre). There have been at least 11 film and TV versions of the book, including the 1995 BBC miniseries starring Colin Firth as a memorable Darcy. Other (looser) adaptations include Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) , Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), the Bollywood movie Bride and Prejudice (2004), the mystery novel Death Comes to Pemberley , and the 2012-2013 web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries . Do you love reading? Are you eager to know incredibly interesting facts about novelists and their works? Then pick up our new book, The Curious Reader: A Literary Miscellany of Novels and Novelists, out May 25! Blaine Josten's Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice by Blaine Josten. Jane Austen began writing the novel which later became Pride and Prejudice in October of 1796 and finished it by August of the following year; she was then twenty-one years old. Little is known of this early version of the story beyond its original title: First Impressions . No copy of that original is known to exist. Three months after Miss Austen completed work on the book, her father offered it to a publisher in the hope that it would make it into print. The publisher refused without ever having seen the manuscript. Fortunately for all of her admirers, whether Austen was discouraged or not by her first rejection, she continued to write; though, it was not until the winter of 1811, fully fourteen years after finishing First Impressions , that she again picked up that manuscript and began revising it into the version we know today as Pride and Prejudice . This occurred in the wake of her first publishing success--the publication of Sense and Sensibility on 30 October 1811. Pride and Prejudice was far more fortunate than its earlier incarnation; it was accepted for publication and was presented to the world on 28 January 1813. Jane Austen's name was never attached to any of her published novels during her lifetime, and the title page of Pride and Prejudice read only: BY THE AUTHOR OF "SENSE AND SENSIBILITY." Chapter descriptions are designed to be very vague and cryptic. They are for people who are familiar with the book to help them find the chapter they want, and they are not designed for the student who might be looking for a quick way to get out of reading the novel. Pride and Prejudice. Pride and Prejudice was written by Jane Austen in the years following 1796 before its original publication in 1813. It is Austen's second published novel, the first being Sense and Sensibility . Contents. Plot [ edit | edit source ] Tells the story about the Bennet family. Characters [ edit | edit source ] , the protagonist and second child of the Bennet family. , the owner of Longbourn. , his wife. , oldest child of the Benett family. Supporting Characters [ edit | edit source ] Reception [ edit | edit source ] Pride and Prejudice is one of the most well known and beloved novels. Many during Austen's time and afterward have praised it. Sir Walter Scott praised Pride and Prejudice in his journal however Charlotte Brontë's thoughts were very different.