Detailed item info | Synopsis | In early nineteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the suit of a snobbish gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements of her four sisters. Includes explanatory notes throughout the text, an introduction discussing the author and the background of the story, and a study guide.
| | Details | | Series: | Norton Critical Editions Series | | Editor: | Donald Gray |
| | Size | | Length: | 413 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in. | | Width: | 5.3 in. | | Thickness: | 1.0 in. | | Weight: | 15.2 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note |
A perennial favorite in the Norton Critical Editions series, Pride and Prejudice is based on the 1813 first edition text, which has been thoroughly annotated for undergraduate readers.
"Backgrounds and Sources" includes biographical portraits of Austen by members of her family and by acclaimed biographers Claire Tomalin and David Nokes. Seventeen of Austen's letters—eight of them new to the Third Edition—allow readers to glimpse the close-knit society that was Austen's world, both in life and in her writing. Samples of Austen's early writing—from the epistolary Love and FriendshipA Collection of Letters—allow readers to trace her growth as a writer as well as to read her fiction comparatively.
"Criticism" features eighteen assessments of the novel by nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators, six of them new to the Third Edition. Among them is an interview with Colin Firth on the recent BBC television adaptation of the novel. Also included are pieces by Richard Whately, Margaret Oliphant, Richard Simpson, D. W. Harding, Dorothy Van Ghent, Alistair Duckworth, Stuart Tave, Marilyn Butler, Nina Auerbach, Susan Morgan, Claudia L. Johnson, Susan Fraiman, Deborah Kaplan, Tara Goshal Wallace, Cheryl L. Nixon, David Spring, Edward Ahearn, and Donald Gray.
Also included are a Note on Money, a Chronology of Austen's life and work—new to the Third Edition—and an updated Selected Bibliography.
About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehenive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.
| | Industry reviews | "Arrange the great English novelists as one will, it does not seem possible to bring them out in any order where she is not the first, or second or third, whoever her companions may be....A little aloof, a little inscrutable and mysterious, she will always remain, but serene and beautiful also because of her greatness as an artist."
Times Literary Supplement - Virginia Woolf (05/08/1913)
"Five charming sisters on the gayest, merriest manhunt that ever snared a bewildered bachelor! Girls! Take a lesson from these husband hunters!"
MGM promotion of the 1940 film of the novel
"She thought an unattached young woman with intelligence...was the most marvelous creature in the world...What must have made this type so appealing to her, of course, was that this was the only time in their lives in which women like that had an absolute power--if only the power to withhold themselves--over the desires of a man. Austen felt keenly the fragility of the circumstance...This is what makes the scene of Darcy's first proposal so potent: Elizabeth will never experience again so fine an emotional surge as she does when she spurns him. It is the one context in which she is permitted to say exactly what she feels."
New York Review of Books - Louis Menand (02/01/1996)
"This writer of marriage stories...had a mind as interesting as any novelist who has ever lived. In Jane Austen, the mating game assumes dimensions that Boccaccio ignored--the joining of understanding and temperament, property and taste, as well as body and body. If marriage had become the central rite of the new materialist society of Austen's England, it was also the central trial of an individual's worth, which...became the test of his or her ability to perceive and to know."
"Great Books" - David Denby
"Women, we gather, are seldom artists, because they have a passion for detail which conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work. We would cite Sappho and Jane Austen as examples of two great women who combine exquisite detail with a supreme sense of artistic proportion."
Virginia Woolf
"The work [i.e. 'Pride and Prejudice'] is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, on anything that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style."
Jane Austen
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