Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice is a book that speaks to everyone across the centuries, with engaging characters and a well-planned plot around the fairy tale classic of a poor girl growing up and (eventually) marrying her Prince Charming.

But the book is more than just the template for every romance novel and Mills & Boon written since. Philosophers and literary scholars are just some of the experts we’ve interviewed who have chosen Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as essential reading on their topic.

Pride and Prejudice is a perennial favourite book that means it’s still well read today. Along with many other people, it is Austen scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks’s favourite Austen book. In her interview with us she spoke about the best Austen novels and what they mean to her. She has also produced Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition which includes over 2,000 annotations to text giving in-depth analysis.

Our commentary section below highlights some of the reviews of this book when it was first published in 1813. The popularity and strength of the storyline means there have been several theatre and screen adaptions of the book.

Many Five Books experts have chosen Pride and Prejudice as one of the best books in their field of expertise. You can read the reasons why they chose it below:

Recommendations from our site

“I think it’s always been my favourite, as it’s many people’s favourite among Austen’s novels. But I was always vaguely embarrassed by that as a scholar, because I didn’t think it was the best.” Read more...

The Best Jane Austen Books

Patricia Meyer Spacks, Literary Scholar

“The book is about the pleasure of being wrong. We forget that wrongness can be deeply pleasurable, but thankfully we have literature and art to remind us.” Read more...

The best books on Wrongness

Kathryn Schulz, Journalist

“This book is one of the perfect novels, in style and plot and characters. I think it is easy to overlook quite how inspiring it was when it insisted on a woman’s right to marry for love.” Read more...

Books that Changed the World

Amanda Craig, Journalist

“It’s a coming-of-age story, because she throws aside her prejudices but also sees the house and realises that she could be quite comfortable and maybe realises how important that is.” Read more...

The best books on Coming of Age

Meg Rosoff, Children's Author

“As the novel goes on they both re-learn how to judge one another, they re-evaluate the other’s moral worth. Among many other things, Pride and Prejudice is an exploration of moral epistemology.” Read more...

The best books on Ideas that Matter

A C Grayling, Philosopher

Commentary

“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point…I had not seen ‘Pride & Prejudice’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face…I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses”

Charlotte Brontë to GH Lewes, 12 January 1848, quoted in The Brontes: A Life in Letters, by Juliet Barker

“Read again and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.”

Sir Walter Scott, Journal, March, 1826

“The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in fact of her unconsciousness: as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarrassment, she sometimes, over her work basket, her tapestry flowers, in the spare, cool drawing-room of other days, fell a-musing, lapsed too metaphorically, as one may say, into wool-gathering, and her dropped stitches, of these pardonable, of these precious moments, were afterwards picked up as little touches of human truth, little glimpses of steady vision, little master-strokes of imagination.”

Henry James, quoted in David Dowling (ed) Novelists on Novelists