Pride and Prejudice and its Predecessors

Abstract

Pride and Prejudice occupies a central position among Austen’s works. It is the last and most complex of the early novels. It was considerably revised just prior to, or possibly even during, the composition of Mansfield Park (which represents a remarkable advance), yet it incorporates some of her earliest concerns, themes and techniques. A preliminary approach to these themes and techniques must be made through the fiction of Austen’s predecessors, for of all her novels, Pride and Prejudice includes the most embedded, insistent and interesting links to earlier fiction. Too often discussions of the relations to forerunners merely cite the numerous parallel incidents or plots. Lascelles has once and for all defined the uselessness of such efforts: ‘to find an episode or turn of plot in one of Jane Austen’s novels which resembles one in some earlier novel-even though that precursor should be one of her favourites, and prompting be as likely an explanation as coincidence-this tells us very little of what the work of that earlier novelist meant to Jane Austen; for, so long as she remained content to build her plots of these major incidents, she could not but build them of material that had been used already’.¹ The difficulty, then, lies in locating parallels which can be explained by ‘prompting’, not ‘coincidence’, parallels which have intention behind them and which, therefore, point to interesting and illuminating relationships between the methods and intentions of Austen’s fiction and that of her predecessors.