Abstract
Pride and Prejudice is closer to Sense and Sensibility than to Northanger Abbey in its methods, but it is still radically unlike either. It does not present us with competing narrative structures, nor does it explore some of the formal links between ideas in the abstract and ideas in practice. To connect Darcy simply with ‘pride’ or Elizabeth with ‘prejudice’ is to be very reductive: to seek a useful antithesis or synthesis in the title is to be mistaken.
‘… but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage.’ (Elizabeth Bennet)
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Notes
Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. Petrie (1967) pp. 77, 160.
Sir Walter Scott, unsigned review of Emma (1815, pp. 194–5). At least one critic has attempted a sophisticated defence of Scott’s account: see McCann (1964, pp. 73–4).
There is for example the argument that ‘marriage is not commonly unhappy, otherwise than as life is unhappy’, and mention of the ‘ancient custom of the Muscovites’ whereby couples did not meet until they were married, since courtship merely allows individuals ‘to hinder themselves from being known, and to disguise their natural temper, and real desires, in hypocritical imitation, studied compliance, and continued affectation’ — Johnson, Works, III (1969) 243–7.
Edgeworth, The Absentee (1910 edn) p. 281;
Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1906 edn) p. 477;
Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Hutchinson, pp. 734–5; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. Watson (1956) pp. 188–200.
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© 1986 Michael Williams
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Williams, M. (1986). Pride and Prejudice: Informal Arguments. In: Jane Austen: Six Novels and their Methods. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18285-5_4
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