What Pride and Prejudice Tells Us About British History, Class, and Women’s Leisure Time

The first dialogue readers encounter in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a conversation between a wife and husband who have been married for twenty-three years. Mrs. Bennet is all aflutter about news that a rich bachelor (Charles Bingley) has rented an elegant estate (Netherfield) near their small market town (Meryton), and Mr. Bennet is pretending not to understand why Bingley’s arrival is so exciting. The Bennets have a respectable home (Longbourn), but they are not wealthy. They have five children that range in age from fifteen to twenty-two, but none of them are sons. The family lives about twenty-five miles from London, but they do not move among the city’s fashionable circles where they would regularly encounter eligible—preferably titled but definitely rich, with property—men.

In Regency-era England, these are problems.

Longbourn is subject to an entail that settles the property on Mr. Bennet’s distant cousin (Mr. Collins) upon Mr. Bennet’s death. The answer to the entail crisis is marriage—either to Mr. Collins or to another man. Otherwise, when Mr. Bennet dies, the Bennet women will be without a family home.

At the start of the novel none of the Bennet girls are married or have suitors. The arrival of a bachelor wealthy enough to rent an elegant estate opens up all manner of opportunities, not only for the young lady lucky enough to land him but also for her family and extended social circle. A successful match between a Bennet daughter and Bingley could uplift the whole family. It would bring them into an extended social network that held greater social power. A successful match came with homes well suited for hosting guests and giving private balls. These are settings where younger sisters and close friends might meet other eligible men. The arrival of a wealthy bachelor who plans to stay for months in a rather quiet town is a huge deal! Mrs. Bennet knows this and so does her sarcastic husband.

To read Pride and Prejudice is to enter a world where marriage is as tied to property and social status as it is to romantic ideas about love and desire. Written in an historical moment when British society’s notions of class were changing, Austen depicts a world where rich bachelors are rare, and single women who are genteel but not wealthy are seeking their fortunes by finding and marrying one.

Like most of Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice follows the romantic fortunes of young women living outside of London’s fashionable circle. They may travel to visit women who have married well enough to host guests, but their lives are mostly quiet and limited to the three or four families they would have grown up knowing. If, as the novel’s witty narrator tells us, Mrs. Bennet’s business is finding suitable partners for her five daughters, it is their job to know a good thing when they see it and to accept marriage proposals, especially those that will secure their family’s future. Netherfield (along with Bingley) is a tantalizing prospect.

This is at the heart of this much-beloved novel about young women who are seeking marriage while also discovering their values and working out how they want to move through the world. The Bennet daughters are at the center of the story, but readers also meet their friends, foils, and rivals.

The novel we know as Pride and Prejudice began as First Impressions, which Austen wrote between October 1796 and October 1797. No copies of the manuscript have survived. However, based on letters and timelines showing Austen’s travels, we know that she revised the novel in 1811 and 1812, changing the title from First Impressions to Pride and Prejudice, probably because Margaret Holford published a novel in 1801 with the same title. Austen sold the novel’s copyright to publisher and bookseller Thomas Egerton for £110.

Pride and Prejudice was the second Austen novel Egerton published. In 1811 he published Sense and Sensibility on commission, which means that Austen assumed all the financial risk. The success of the first run (750 copies sold out) earned Austen £140.

Egerton was known primarily as a purveyor of history and military books who also sold books from libraries he purchased from wealthy men. He advertised Pride and Prejudice in The Morning Chronicle on January 28, 1813. As was the practice of the day, the sales announcement was brief: “This day is published, in 3 vols, price 18s. boards, PRIDE and PREJUDICE; a Novel.—By a LADY, the Author of Sense and Sensibility. Printed for T. Egerton. near Whitehall.”

Although Austen published anonymously, her family supported her writing; it was her father who wrote to publishers about First Impressions. While visiting London in September 1813, she writes that the Marquess of Lothian’s daughter-in-law enjoyed the novel: “Lady Robert is delighted with P.&P—and really was so as I understood before she knew I wrote it—for of course, she knows now.—”

At a time when novel writing was considered an improper activity for well-bred young women, Austen’s family and circle were happy with her work and proud to share her accomplishments with friends and relations.

It might be tempting to think that Austen lived completely cordoned off from the political upheavals of her historical moment, quietly writing at her desk. However quiet her life might have been, it is important to remember that she was intensely interested in the world around her and grew up in a home that encouraged both her curiosity and creativity. During her lifetime, England faced seismic changes that she would have understood in part because of her family’s political ties and entanglements and in part because she had access to her father’s library. She read novels, poems, political treatises, plays, and an array of books about British history and culture. She especially enjoyed novels by Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Ann Radcliffe. She read plays by Richard Sheridan, Lord Byron’s poetry, and abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s treatises against slavery. She read broadly and wrote her fiction in an era of revolutions and violent political unrest that resonated across the globe.

Her world saw the end of the American Revolution, the storming of the Bastille in France, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the final years of England’s abolitionist movement. Consider this: The United States (née the British colonies) declared its independence from England when Austen was seven months old. Her youthful stories (The Juvenilia) were written during the French Revolution.

In 1791, when she was fifteen years old, pamphleteer William Fox published An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum, an abolitionist pamphlet that was widely read in England and the United States. A year later, in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published, and a year after that, in 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined. In 1803, Britain joined the Napoleonic Wars. The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807.

In 1811, the same year that saw the publication of Sense and Sensibility, King George III was declared mentally disabled and replaced by his son. He became prince regent, and during his reign Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, which Austen dedicated to the prince regent, were published.

In this world, her father was a member of the clergy, two of her brothers were in the navy, members of her extended family circle lived in the West Indies, one of whom (her brother Charles’s godfather) owned a plantation there. Her sister Cassandra’s fiancé, Thomas Fowle, died of yellow fever in the Caribbean in 1797.

Pride and Prejudice was written and published at a time when England faced political unrest and social upheaval in every corner. The country was involved in military and social crises, and women were making political gains in asserting their rights, their creative ambitions, and their role in national politics as they took part in debates about Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade. There are moments when Austen’s novels explicitly point to the history of the period, particularly in Persuasion and Mansfield Park, where the novel’s patriarch leaves his English estate to attend to his plantation in Antigua.

At first glance, these moments seem largely absent from Pride and Prejudice, but the British economy and its social strata relied on its status as an empire—from its participation in the transatlantic slave trade to its reliance on the East India Company. We don’t talk much about it now, but by the time the novel was published everyone in England would have known that part of the country’s wealth relied on the transatlantic slave trade and on the subjugation of enslaved peoples.

In 1778 the prime minister, Lord Shelburne, claimed that there were “scarcely ten miles together throughout the country where the house and estate of a rich West Indian was not to be seen.” Over its final thirty years the abolitionist movement was a popular cause written about in novels, poems, and pamphlets that Austen would have known about and read.

Alongside global crises and debates, women—and how they spent their leisure time—faced a new kind of scrutiny. This was in part a response to more permeable social hierarchies that were manifested by the daughters of wealthy merchants socializing and marrying into landed families. Women’s buying power was also on the rise. These shifts were captured in novels.

While the genre was wildly popular in Austen’s time, it was also seen as a threat to women’s moral education and as a dangerous distraction; they were considered deeply unserious in an era when poetry was the genre for serious reflection and high ideals. Writing in 1802, physician Thomas Beddoes was concerned enough about novel reading to rant against the practice in his treatise Hygëia, or Essays Moral and Medical:

Our literature is no inconsiderable source of our effeminacy. As to the sort of reading, most injurious to young females, I cordially assent to the opinion of almost all men of reflection. NOVELS, undoubtedly, are the sort most injurious. Novels render the sensibility still more diseased. And they increase indolence, the imaginary world indisposing those, who inhabit it in thought, to go abroad into the real.

Austen’s resistance to this characterization of the genre is evident in all her novels, especially in the spirited defense she includes in Northanger Abbey. The genre’s growing popularity and availability meant that novels circulated alongside classical literature, travel journals, and military histories.

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