Pride and Prejudice

Few novels open with a sentence as instantly recognizable as “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” With that line Austen announces her method: comedy on the surface, economics underneath.

This page is the starting point for everything on Pride and Prejudice on this site. Each section below links to a fuller guide: plot summary, characters, themes, best editions, every screen adaptation, and the full text to read free, chapter by chapter.

Pride and Prejudice at a glance

Author	Jane Austen, published anonymously
Written	October 1796 – August 1797 as First Impressions; revised 1811–12
Published	28 January 1813, by Thomas Egerton, in three volumes
Length	About 122,000 words; 61 chapters
Reading time	Eight to ten hours
Setting	Hertfordshire, Kent and Derbyshire, early 1810s
Heroine	Elizabeth Bennet, aged twenty
Hero	Fitzwilliam Darcy, of Pemberley
Read it	Free online, chapter by chapter

What is Pride and Prejudice about?

Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have five daughters and a problem. Their estate, Longbourn, is entailed on the nearest male relative, a clergyman cousin called Mr. Collins, so when Mr. Bennet dies the girls will lose their home. Mrs. Bennet’s solution is to marry them off, and when a rich young man, Mr. Bingley, rents the nearby house of Netherfield, she sees her chance.

Bingley falls for the eldest daughter, Jane, almost at once. His friend Mr. Darcy, who is far richer, makes a very different impression: at the first ball he refuses to dance and calls the second daughter, Elizabeth, merely “tolerable” within her hearing. Elizabeth decides she knows exactly what kind of man he is. Over the following year she meets the charming officer Mr. Wickham, who has a story about Darcy’s cruelty; turns down Mr. Collins; visits her newly married friend Charlotte in Kent; and receives a proposal she does not expect from the last person she would have imagined.

The rest of the novel is about what happens when two proud, intelligent people discover they have both been wrong. For the complete plot, chapter by chapter, see the Pride and Prejudice summary.

From “First Impressions” to publication

Austen drafted the novel as First Impressions between October 1796 and August 1797, when she was just twenty-one. Her father offered it to the publisher Thomas Cadell in November 1797; it was declined by return of post, unread. She revised it substantially around 1811–1812, retitled it, and sold the copyright to Thomas Egerton for £110.

The new title may have come from Fanny Burney’s novel Cecilia (1782), which uses the phrase “pride and prejudice” in capital letters near its end; another novel called First Impressions had also appeared in the meantime. When the first copies arrived at Chawton, Austen called the book “my own darling child” in a letter to her sister Cassandra, and a week later joked that it was “rather too light and bright and sparkling.” It sold well from the start. Egerton brought out a second edition the same year, and the novel has never been out of print since.

Main characters

Character	Who they are
Elizabeth Bennet	The second daughter: twenty, quick, funny and too sure of her own judgement
Fitzwilliam Darcy	Owner of Pemberley in Derbyshire, £10,000 a year, proud and reserved
Jane Bennet	The eldest sister, beautiful and determined to think well of everyone
Mr. Bennet	Clever, sardonic, and happiest in his library away from his family
Mrs. Bennet	Nervous, loud and single-minded about getting her daughters married
Mary, Kitty and Lydia Bennet	The younger sisters: bookish, easily led, and wild
Charles Bingley	Darcy’s good-natured friend, who rents Netherfield
Caroline Bingley	His sister, who wants Darcy for herself
George Wickham	A charming militia officer with a grudge against Darcy
Mr. William Collins	The pompous clergyman cousin who will inherit Longbourn
Charlotte Lucas	Elizabeth’s practical friend, who marries Mr. Collins
Lady Catherine de Bourgh	Darcy’s aunt and Mr. Collins’s patroness, at Rosings Park
Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner	Mrs. Bennet’s sensible brother and his wife, from London
Georgiana Darcy	Darcy’s shy younger sister

The Pride and Prejudice characters guide covers every character, including the ones this table leaves out, and how they are connected.

Where and when it is set

Most of the novel takes place in and around Longbourn, the Bennets’ house in Hertfordshire, a mile from the market town of Meryton, where the militia are quartered for the winter. Netherfield Park, Bingley’s rented house, is three miles away. In the middle of the book Elizabeth travels to Hunsford in Kent, the Collinses’ parsonage beside Lady Catherine’s estate, Rosings. In the third volume she tours Derbyshire with the Gardiners and visits Darcy’s house, Pemberley. London appears mainly as the Gardiners’ address in Gracechurch Street, and Brighton, where the regiment goes for the summer, is offstage but important.

Austen never names a year, but the novel was revised for publication in 1811–12, and scholars who have reconstructed its calendar usually place it across those years. It covers about fifteen months, from Bingley’s arrival in the autumn to the double wedding at the end. For the wider world the novel takes for granted, see when was the Regency era.

Themes

• Pride and prejudice. Both leads have both faults. Darcy’s pride makes him careless of other people’s feelings; Elizabeth’s pride in her own perception makes her prejudiced. The novel’s turning point is her realisation, after Darcy’s letter, that “till this moment I never knew myself.”
• Marriage and money. Almost every marriage in the book is a case study: the Bennets’ mismatch, Charlotte’s clear-eyed bargain with Mr. Collins, Lydia’s elopement, the Gardiners’ happy partnership. Austen never pretends money does not matter.
• Class. Darcy’s first proposal insults Elizabeth’s family as well as flattering her. Lady Catherine’s objections in Chapter 56 put the class question at its bluntest, and Elizabeth’s answer is the novel’s: “He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter.”
• Judgement and first impressions. The original title was not an accident. The whole plot turns on characters judging too fast and learning to look again.

Our themes guide develops each of these with quotations and chapter references.

The key chapters

Chapter	What happens
1	“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”: Mr. and Mrs. Bennet discuss Bingley
3	The Meryton assembly: Darcy finds Elizabeth “tolerable”
19	Mr. Collins proposes
34	Darcy’s first proposal at Hunsford
35	Darcy’s letter
43	Elizabeth visits Pemberley
46	News of Lydia’s elopement
56	Lady Catherine confronts Elizabeth
58	The second proposal
61	The final chapter: what became of everyone

Pride and Prejudice on screen

Pride and Prejudice is the most-adapted of Austen’s novels, with more than a dozen screen versions since a lost BBC broadcast in 1938. The two most people know are the 1995 BBC miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth and the 2005 film with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. A new six-part Netflix series, with Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden, arrives on 3 December 2026. Our guide to every Pride and Prejudice adaptation compares all of them, back to Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in 1940.

Which edition to read

Any complete text will do, and the whole novel is free to read on this site. If you want a printed copy, the choice mostly comes down to notes and presentation. Our guide to the best editions compares annotated, illustrated and gift editions.

Why it endures

The marriage plot was hardly new in 1813. What Austen added was a heroine who thinks — and misthinks — in front of us, and a narrative voice (free indirect style) that lets us share Elizabeth’s errors as if they were our own.

It is also the best place to start with Austen. It is shorter than Emma or Mansfield Park, funnier than Sense and Sensibility, and its central couple is the model for two centuries of romantic comedy. See Jane Austen’s books in order for where to go next.