Jane Austen, the daughter of a clergyman, was born in Hampshire in 1775, and later lived in Bath and the village of Chawton. As a child and teenager, she wrote brilliantly witty stories for her family's amusement, as well as a novella,
Lady Susan. Her first published novel was
Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in 1811 and was soon followed by
Pride and Prejudice,
Mansfield Park and
Emma. Austen died in 1817, and
Persuasion and
Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist' Independent
With its 'light and bright and sparkling' dialogue, its romantic denouement and its lively heroine, Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's most perennially popular novel. The love story of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, who misjudge, then challenge and change each other, is also a novel about the search for happiness and self- knowledge in a world of strict social rules, where a woman must marry well to survive.
Edited with an introduction and notes by VIVIEN JONES
