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  PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

  JANE AUSTEN was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. She lived with her family at Steventon until they moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. After his death in 1805, she moved around with her mother; in 1809, they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. Here she remained, except for a few visits to London, until in May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. There she died on 18 July 1817.

  Jane Austen was extremely modest about her own genius, describing her work to her nephew, Edward, as ‘the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory, on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour’. As a girl she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. Her works were published only after much revision, four novels being published in her lifetime. These are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815–16. She also left two earlier compositions, a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.

  VIVIEN JONES is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. She has published books on Henry James and Jane Austen, and her publications on gender and writing in the eighteenth century include Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (1990) and Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800 (2000), as well as numerous articles. She has edited Frances Burney’s Evelina for Oxford World’s Classics.

  CLAIRE LAMONT is Textual Adviser for the works of Jane Austen in Penguin Classics.

  TONY TANNER was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Cambridge. He taught and travelled extensively in America and Europe. Among his many books are The Reign of Wonder (1965); City of Words (1970); Contract and Transgression: Adultery and the Novel (1980); Jane Austen (1986); Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (1987); Venice Desired (1992); Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction (1995); and The American Mystery (2000). Tony Tanner died in December 1998.

  JANE AUSTEN

  Pride and Prejudice

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  VIVIEN JONES

  With the original Penguin Classics Introduction by

  TONY TANNER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1813

  Published in Penguin Classics 1996

  This edition reissued with new Chronology, updated Further Reading

  and 1972 Penguin Classics Introduction by Tony Tanner 2003

  6

  Introduction and Notes copyright © Vivien Jones, 1996, 2003

  Textual Adviser’s Note and Chronology copyright © Claire Lamont, 1995, 2003

  Appendix: Original Penguin Classics Introduction copyright © Tony Tanner, 1972

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

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  EISBEN: 978–0–141–90721–5

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  The Penguin Edition of the Novels of Jane Austen

  Chronology

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  Note on the Text

  Pride and Prejudice

  Volume One

  Volume Two

  Volume Three

  Appendix: Original Penguin Classics Introduction by Tony Tanner

  Emendations to the Text

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  I want to thank John Barnard, Paul Hammond, Rick Jones, Angela Keane, David Lindley, Oliver Pickering, Susan Spearey, Andrew Wawn and John Whale for their help in preparing this edition. It was completed during study leave funded by the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy, and I am grateful for research time, both to them and to the School of English, University of Leeds.

  Vivien Jones

  June 1995

  The Penguin Edition of the Novels of Jane Austen

  The texts of Austen’s novels in the Penguin Edition are based on the first editions and have been edited afresh. The texts of four of the novels are necessarily based on the first edition: in the case of Pride and Prejudice Austen sold the copyright to the publisher of the first edition and was not involved with the preparation of the two further editions in her lifetime; Emma did not reach a second edition in Britain in Austen’s lifetime; and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously. Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, however, both appeared in second editions in which Austen took some part. Hitherto all reprints of these novels have been based on the second editions. The Penguin Edition returns to the first-edition texts of both novels, and includes a list of the substantive variants between the two editions so that readers can see clearly for the first time the alterations made between the first and second editions.

  The editors have worked from copies of the first editions kindly supplied by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The editorial policy is one of minimum intervention: no attempt has been made to modernize spelling or punctuation, or to render spellings consistent so long as the variant spellings were acceptable in the period. Where any of these might cause difficulty to the modern reader the editor has offered help and explanation in a note.

  The editors have emended the text in the following circumstances: errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected. Where, after all allowance has been made for historical usage, the text seems faulty the editors have cautiously emended it. They have been assisted by the fact that there is a tradition of Austen scholarship. The first edition of Austen’s novels to examine the texts thoroughly was The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R. W. Chapman, 5 vols (Clarendon, 1923). This pioneering edition was itself revised in later reprints, and all recent editions have been either based on Chapman’s text or acknowledge debts to it. The editors of the Penguin Edition have edited Austen’s texts anew from the first editions, but in making decisions about obscurities and cruxes they have borne in mind the work of previous commentators on the Austen texts. The greatest of these is R. W. Chapman, but there have been others, including critics and general readers who have from time to