Delight and Prejudice

Encyclopedia Britannica

Ask the ChatbotGames & QuizzesHistory & SocietyScience & TechBiographiesAnimals & NatureGeography & TravelArts & CultureProConMoneyVideos

Literature

Novels & Brief Tales

Delight and Prejudice

novel by Austen

Also referred to as: “First Impressions”

Written by 

Reality-checked by 

Final Up to date: Mar 14, 2025 • Article Historical past

Delight and Prejudice

Delight and Prejudice Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle within the TV miniseries Delight and Prejudice (1995).

High Questions

What’s Delight and Prejudice?

Who’s the creator of Delight and Prejudice?

What’s the plot of Delight and Prejudice?

Delight and Prejudice, romantic novel by Jane Austen, printed anonymously in three volumes in 1813. A basic of English literature, written with incisive wit and excellent character delineation, it facilities on the burgeoning relationship between Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a rustic gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy aristocratic landowner. Upon publication, Delight and Prejudice was nicely acquired by critics and readers. The primary version offered out throughout the first 12 months, and it by no means went out of print.

Characters

Delight and Prejudice is ready in rural England on the flip of the nineteenth century, and it follows the Bennet household, which incorporates 5 very totally different sisters. The eldest, Jane, is sweet-tempered and modest. She is her sister Elizabeth’s confidant and pal. Elizabeth, the heroine of the novel, is clever and high-spirited. She shares her father’s distaste for the traditional views of society as to the significance of wealth and rank. The third daughter, Mary, is obvious, bookish, and pompous, whereas Lydia and Kitty, the 2 youngest, are flighty and immature.

Mr. Bennet is the household patriarch. He’s keen on his two eldest daughters—particularly his favourite, Elizabeth—however takes a passive curiosity within the youthful ones, in the end failing to curb their infantile instincts. An clever however eccentric and sarcastic man, he doesn’t take care of society’s conventions and mocks his spouse’s obsession with discovering appropriate husbands for his or her daughters. As a number of students have famous, nevertheless, Mrs. Bennet is rightfully involved. Due to an entail, the modest household property is to be inherited by William Collins, Mr. Bennet’s nephew, who’s the following male in line. Certainly, as Austen scholar Mary Evans famous, “If Mrs. Bennett is barely loopy, then maybe she is so as a result of she perceives extra clearly than her husband the doable destiny of her 5 daughters if they don’t marry.” Sadly, Mrs. Bennet’s fervor and indelicacy usually work in opposition to her pursuits. A girl of little sense and far self-pity, she indulges her energetic youngest daughters.

All through the novel, the Bennet sisters encounter a number of eligible bachelors, together with Charles Bingley, Darcy, Lieutenant George Wickham, and Collins. Bingley has lately let Netherfield property, which neighbors the Bennets’ house, Longbourn. Austen describes him as “handsome and gentlemanlike; [having] a pleasing countenance and simple, unaffected manners.” He has come by his fortune by means of his household’s curiosity in commerce, which was seen as a much less respectable technique of acquiring wealth than by inheriting it, as his pal Darcy has carried out. Darcy is clearly a product of this hierarchical pondering: he believes within the pure superiority of the rich landed gentry. He’s boastful however perceptive.

Darcy’s estates have been as soon as managed by Wickham’s father, however he and Wickham are not pleasant. Wickham is enticing and charming, making him instantly common among the many girls within the close by city of Meryton, the place he and different troopers have been stationed. Collins, alternatively, is “not a wise man, and the deficiency of nature had been however little assisted by training or society.” He’s a priest whose patron, the controlling Girl Catherine de Bourgh, is Darcy’s aunt.

Different supporting characters within the novel embrace Elizabeth’s pal Charlotte Lucas, who’s described as smart and nearing an age the place marriage is unlikely; Charlotte’s mother and father, Sir William and Girl Lucas; Mrs. Bennet’s brother, Edward Gardiner, who works in commerce, and his spouse, each of whom are beneficiant and well-grounded; Bingley’s sisters, the snobbish and scheming Caroline and Louisa Hurst; and Darcy’s 16-year-old sister, Georgiana, who’s painfully shy however good-humored.