---
type: Object
title: Pride and Prejudice
description: Jane Austen's 1813 novel of the Bennet family, first drafted in the 1790s
  and here reproduced in an 1894 illustrated edition.
resource: raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt
tags:
- pride-and-prejudice
- jane-austen
- novel
- literary-criticism
- regency-era
aliases:
- P&P
timestamp: '2026-07-16T17:35:47Z'
citadel_version: 0.3.0
---

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by [Jane Austen](../persons/jane-austen.md).[^s1] It was first
drafted in about 1796, when Austen was barely twenty-one, then revised and finished at Chawton
some fifteen years later; it was published in 1813, four years before Austen's death.[^s2]

## This edition

This text is the George Allen (London) illustrated edition of 1894, with a preface by the literary
critic George Saintsbury and illustrations by Hugh Thomson.[^s3]

## Critical reception (Saintsbury's preface)

The preface's author, George Saintsbury, declares the novel his own favourite among Austen's six
novels — "the most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its
author's works" — ranking it above the more popular *Emma* and above *Northanger Abbey*,
*Persuasion*, *Mansfield Park*, and *Sense and Sensibility*.[^s4] He credits much of this to the
novel's construction: "hardly a character, hardly an incident could be retrenched without loss to
the story," and singles out the elopement of Lydia and Wickham as integrating naturally with the
earlier plot rather than arriving as a contrivance.[^s5]

Saintsbury argues that the character of [Mr. Collins](../persons/mr-collins.md) is the
novel's Swiftian high point — "really great; far greater than anything Addison ever did" — and
calls him more fully realized than Austen's earlier, comparable sketch of John Dashwood in *Sense
and Sensibility*.[^s6] He also holds up [Mr. Darcy](../persons/fitzwilliam-darcy.md) as, in his
view, the best of Austen's heroes, and [Elizabeth Bennet](../persons/elizabeth-bennet.md) as
combining playfulness, wit, and "a certain fearlessness very uncommon in heroines of her type and
age."[^s7]

## See also

- [Jane Austen](../persons/jane-austen.md)
- [Elizabeth Bennet](../persons/elizabeth-bennet.md)
- [Fitzwilliam Darcy](../persons/fitzwilliam-darcy.md)
- [Mr. Collins](../persons/mr-collins.md)

## Sources

[^s1]: [raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt](../../raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt), lines 17-29 — title page names Austen as author, Saintsbury as preface author, Thomson as illustrator (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s2]: [raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt](../../raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt), lines 108-114 — Saintsbury's preface on the novel's composition and publication history (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s3]: [raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt](../../raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt), lines 1-29 — publisher (George Allen), preface author, and illustrator credits from the frontmatter (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s4]: [raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt](../../raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt), lines 76-96 — Saintsbury ranks the novel against Austen's other five (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s5]: [raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt](../../raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt), lines 105-110 — Saintsbury on the novel's construction and the Lydia/Wickham elopement (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s6]: [raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt](../../raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt), lines 265-278 — Saintsbury on Mr. Collins vs. John Dashwood (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s7]: [raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt](../../raw/pride-and-prejudice.txt), lines 362-363, 413-417 — Saintsbury on Darcy and Elizabeth (ingested 2026-07-16)
