Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
The most famous novels by Jane Austen, one of the greatest novelists in the world of literature, are Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.
Pride and Prejudice has always been my favorite. The most predominant theme in Pride and prejudice is love and matrimony. The opening lines of Pride and Prejudice are most famous, and strike the keynote of the novel: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
These lines are spoken by Mrs. Bennet to her husband Mr. Bennet. Mrs. Bennet desires to find suitable husbands for her five daughters. The popularity of the novel is substantiated by the fact that it has sold about 20 million copies across the globe.
It is not possible to agree with Charlotte Bronte’s violent criticism of the novel: “I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin bone!” What a great error of perspective!
The most wonderful thing in her novels is that she deals human beings of ordinary life with gentle irony and satire without inflicting any wound. This makes her fiction quite different from that of historical novelist Walter Scott. Scott rightly confessed: “ The big things I can do myself like anyone going, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of description and the sentiment is denied me.”
Thomas Macaulay described Jane Austen the novelist to "have approached nearest to the manner of the great master" Shakespeare. Perhaps only the Bible can match the popularity of Pride and Prejudice. "Of all great writers," Virginia Woolf remarked "she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness."