Literature: Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, is a novel studied at GCSE English Literature about how Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy learn to read each other correctly, set inside a marriage market where a woman's economic survival depends on getting that reading right. Austen's central technique is free indirect discourse, in which the narrator adopts Elizabeth's thoughts and idiom so the reader shares her misjudgements of Wickham and Darcy, while irony and a spectrum of marriages, from Charlotte's pragmatic bargain to Elizabeth's union of affection and respect, drive the novel's argument about marriage.
Before you start
Make sure you're comfortable with these topics first:
Method
- Decide what the question is testing: character development, the presentation of marriage, class and social status, the role of women, or Austen's narrative method.
- Track change rather than describing state. Elizabeth's and Darcy's positions at Netherfield, at Hunsford and at Pemberley are three different points, and an essay that quotes only the first proposal has not shown a journey.
- Name Austen's methods precisely. Free indirect discourse, irony, epistolary insertion for Darcy's letter, and dialogue that reveals character through idiom are all method points that attract analysis marks.
- Read irony as argument. When the narrator states something approvingly, ask whether the novel endorses it; the opening sentence and much of what is said about Mr Collins work by saying the opposite of what is meant.
- Use the entail and the specific sums of money the novel names, since Austen is precise about income and it is the material basis of every decision.
- Set characters against each other to sharpen a point: Charlotte against Elizabeth on marriage, Wickham against Darcy on manners and morals, Jane against Elizabeth on judgement.
- Handle context by explaining what it makes possible or impossible for a character, rather than by narrating Regency history in a separate paragraph.
Worked example
Plan a response to: how does Austen present attitudes to marriage in Pride and Prejudice?
- Set the thesis: Austen presents marriage as an economic institution that the novel refuses to romanticise, while still arguing that a marriage founded on mutual understanding is both possible and better, and she makes that argument by placing every match on a scale.
- Paragraph one, the opening sentence and Mrs Bennet. The universal truth is immediately shown to be a local anxiety, and Mrs Bennet's business of getting her daughters married is presented comically but is materially rational, since the entail leaves them with nothing.
- Paragraph two, Charlotte Lucas. She marries Mr Collins knowing exactly what he is, and tells Elizabeth she asks only a comfortable home. Austen does not punish her, and the visit to Hunsford shows Charlotte managing her husband with quiet competence. This is the novel's hardest and most honest passage on marriage.
- Paragraph three, Lydia and Wickham. The elopement threatens every sister's prospects, and the marriage is bought by Darcy with money. Austen shows that the romantic elopement, the apparent opposite of Charlotte's calculation, is in fact the more purely financial transaction.
- Paragraph four, the first proposal against the second. At Hunsford, Darcy proposes while cataloguing Elizabeth's inferior connections; she refuses. At the end he proposes having changed the way he speaks to her, and she accepts. The difference is not wealth, which is unchanged, but the recognition of her as an equal.
- Paragraph five, the method. Free indirect discourse means the reader shares Elizabeth's certainty about Wickham and her contempt for Darcy, so the reader is corrected along with her by the letter in Chapter 35. The reading of a marriage plot becomes a lesson in reading people.
- Conclude: Austen presents marriage as necessarily economic and shows why, but reserves her approval for the match in which neither party has had to shrink, which is why Elizabeth's refusals matter more than her acceptance.
Practice questions
Try each question, then tap to reveal the answer.
Q1Explain what the entail is and why it drives the plot.Show answer
Answer: The Longbourn estate is legally settled so that it must pass to a male heir, Mr Collins, rather than to Mr Bennet's daughters. If Mr Bennet dies before they marry, the family loses its home and income, so every daughter's marriage is an economic necessity as well as a personal choice.
Q2Define free indirect discourse and give one moment where Austen's use of it misleads the reader.Show answer
Answer: Narration that takes on a character's thoughts and idiom without quotation marks. When Elizabeth accepts Wickham's account of Darcy, the narration adopts her confidence, so the reader believes it too and is corrected only by Darcy's letter.
Q3Why does Elizabeth refuse Mr Collins, and what does the refusal show?Show answer
Answer: She refuses because she cannot respect him, despite the security the marriage would bring her whole family. It shows that she values self-respect above material safety, and it sets up the contrast with Charlotte, who accepts him days later.
Q4What changes Elizabeth's view of Darcy, and in what order?Show answer
Answer: First his letter, which explains Wickham and gives his reasons about Jane; then Pemberley and the housekeeper's account of him as a generous master; then his conduct over Lydia, which he does without wanting credit. Evidence of character accumulates before feeling changes.
Q5How does Austen use Mr Collins for satire?Show answer
Answer: Through his idiom: his speeches are long, formulaic and packed with deference to Lady Catherine, so the reader hears social climbing as a verbal habit. He also proposes to two women within days, which exposes the marriage market as a matter of availability rather than affection.
Q6Give one way the novel presents the limits placed on women.Show answer
Answer: Any one of: the entail, which excludes daughters from inheritance; the impossibility of respectable paid work for a gentlewoman; the requirement that a woman wait to be proposed to; the fact that Lydia's conduct endangers all five sisters' reputations, so a woman's social standing depends on her relatives.
Q7Why is the opening sentence ironic?Show answer
Answer: It presents as a universally acknowledged truth a claim that is neither universal nor a truth. The sentence describes what the neighbourhood's mothers want to believe about wealthy single men, so it announces at once that the novel's narrator is not to be taken at face value.
Exam-style questions
Written in the style of a English exam paper, with a full mark scheme.
Read the moment in Chapter 34 at which Darcy proposes to Elizabeth for the first time at Hunsford, dwelling on her inferiority and the family obstacles to the match, and is refused. Starting with this extract, explore how Austen presents pride in the novel. Write about this extract and the novel as a whole.
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How does Austen present the relationship between money and marriage in Pride and Prejudice?
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