Pride & Prejudice

The story of the Bennet family and of Mrs Bennet" efforts to marry off her five daughters is well known — perhaps too well known for the novel's own good. Many readers, beguiled by the charm of the story and misled by Jane Austen's modest disclaimer about the work's light, bright and sparkling quality, have underrated the author's incisiveness and failed fully to grasp her purpose. The account of the courtship of Elizabeth and Darcy, which reveals not only their own complicated and perverse characters but much about the ethos of their society, is always in danger of being trivialized into a mere comedy of manners. But Pride and Prejudice is by no means as artlessly effervescent as it may at first sight appear. <br/> <br/>Jane Austen's ironic self-criticism has frequently caused her, like her own heroine, to be misunderstood, and in his introduction Peter Conrad discusses the subtlety of her art and idiom, and her telling use of irony to expose the vices and failings of the society which she describes with such affectionate yet deadly accuracy.