Pride and Prejudice- 3 essay
Uploaded by love786 on May 04, 2006
Jane Austen was born in 1775 in Hampshire. Her father was a vicar and she had six brothers and a sister. At the age of sixteen she started writing humorous novels. In 1813 she published ‘Pride and Prejudice’. She never got married and she died in 1817 at the age of forty-two. Jane Austen thought that the situation that should be written about is ‘two or three families living together in a country village’. She never wrote about environments she did not know about and only wrote about gentry like herself. That is why the characters in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ are middle class people, like landowners, vicars, and officers. She does not mention servants much.
Marriage in Jane Austen’s society marriage is the status all the women strive to achieve. Money and looks are essential for a good marriage, youthfulness also counts. If a woman never got married, because of lacking money or looks, she would go and live with a married sister or brother. If she did not have any brothers or sisters to live with, she would become a governess.
‘Pride and Prejudice’s’first sentence, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,’ introduces the theme of marriage, and money, in an ironic way. Jane Austen starts off using intellectual sounding words to introduce the hunt for a rich husband. The sentence contains a mixture of comedy, humour and irony that will continue throughout the novel. In ‘Pride and Prejudice’ we see two established marriages, the Bennets and the Gardiners. Throughout the novel four other marriages take place, Lydia with Wickham, Charlotte with Mr Collins, Elizabeth with Darcy, and Jane with Bingley.
Mr and Mrs Bennet have been married for twenty-three years, but they do not really communicate with each other. They have five unmarried daughters. Mr Bennet has a good sense of humour and likes to tease his wife. He pretends not to understand her. He makes outrageous statements that his wife believes. He does not demonstrate any affection towards his wife and is tired of the way she behaves. Mrs Bennet does not get upset when she is the object of her husband’s sarcasm and is not intelligent enough to discriminate between important and trival information. When she is frustrated she complains about her nerves. Mrs Bennet does not understand Mr Bennet,...