Pride and Prejudice [Paperback]

Introduction by Anna Quindlen
Commentary by Margaret Oliphant, George Saintsbury, Mark Twain, A. C. Bradley, Walter A. Raleigh, and Virginia Woolf
 
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The 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 Austen’s witty comedy of manners—one of the most popular novels of all time—that 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 author’s works,” and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as “irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.”
 
Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide"The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste."
--Virginia WoolfAnna Quindlenis a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. Her work includes the essay collectionLots of Candles, Plenty of Cake,the inspirational bookA Short Guide to a Happy Life,and six novels:Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine,andEvery Last One.

1.Pride and Prejudicewas originally titledFirst Impressions.Critic Brian Southam notes that this phrase comes from the language of the sentimental novels Austen often criticized, where it connoted the idea that one ought to trust one's immediate, intuitive response to things. It is widely believel³)