Pride and Prejudice Book Review

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Recommended: analysis of Pride and prejudice

The novel, Pride and prejudice, by Jane Austen criticizes the societal nature of England in the 18th century, through the characters and the story. She successfully integrates pride, prejudice and romance. She demonstrates that love can transcend societal divisions and personal pride although it can also be suppressed and overcome by them. The story revolves around the Bennett daughters centrally, Elizabeth and Jane who are being courted by different men who are wealthy, and a marriage to any of them is seen as a way for the women to have any chance of a prosperous life. Austen creates various challenges where the lovers have to overcome before they can find love and get their happily ever after. The people and events are used to depict the prejudicial, ignorant and proud nature of society, which is portrayed as being inhibitors to happiness. Austen depicts pride and prejudice and their consequences in the plot and the use of satire and it contends that she appears to covertly propose a society where people are judged on their own merit rather than their social standing.

Pride and prejudice prevents people from seeing the best in others and causes them to pass uniformed judgements, which can result in misunderstanding and breakdown of social relationships. During the first Ball, Mr Darcy struck a nerve with Elizabeth and the community when she refused to dance with her or any other woman, the general consensus was that he was a snob and this made people take to disliking him from the beginning. When Bingley approached him to dance with Elizabeth, he dismissed her by saying "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men” (Au...

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...n as he says, “But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world,"(Austen 23). At the end of the day, it is evident that Austen’s ideal for a society would be one that does not discriminate of judge people according to their social status or wealth but their personal strengths and weakness. To make this point, she uses the two central characters, Elizabeth and Darcy, to show how pride and prejudice can blind people to the good qualities in others. In their case, they were able to conquer this negative traits but others like Wickham and Collins were did not and they are juxtaposed in that they ended up in marriages of convenience, while Darcy and Elizabeth and to some extent Jane and Binglely married for love.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. (1775–1817). Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin Classics. 2008. Print.

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