Introduction by Anna Quindlen Nominated as one of Americas best-loved novels by PBSsThe Great American Read

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. So beginsPride and Prejudice,Jane Austens witty comedy of mannersone of the most popular novels of all timethat features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its authors works, and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.

Probably the popular favourite among Jane Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice was the first to be written (1796-7), when the author was just twenty-one. Revised for publication thirteen years later, it combines the freshness of youth with the skill of maturity, not least in the brilliance of the characterization and the attractiveness of the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet.