that a video series about world literature must be in want of a Jane Austen episode.

So here it is.

Today, we'll be discussing Pride and Prejudice, Austen's Regency-era novel of life, liberty

and bonnets.

The book was first published in 1813, it's a social satire about a family with five daughters

and quite a lot of economic anxiety.

And the novel's characters and themes have remained relevant for centuries now--which

is why there are SO.

MANY. adaptations of it, from the Keira Knightly movie to an Emmy winning web series co-created

by my brother.

Today, we'll talk about the social and historical context in which the book was written

, the style that Jane Austen helped invent, and

the dilemmas the major characters face.

And in the next episode, we'll look more closely at the politics of the book and its

attitudes toward money, class and gender.

But for now: It's bonnets all the way down.

INTRO So we don't know that much about Jane Austen's

life because after her death her sister burned most of her letters.

Just a friendly note, by the way, to any future literary executors out there, maybe don't

burn so much stuff?

Even if you're told to.

Wait, unless your MY literary executor.

Then burn everything.

But, here's what we do know: Jane Austen was born in 1775 to an Anglican clergyman

and his wife; Jane was the second youngest of eight children.

And her father farmed and took in students to makes ends meet.

Jane was mostly taught at home and sometimes she wasn't taught at all, although she and

her sister did go to a year or two of boarding school.

When she was eleven, Jane started writing plays and novels, mostly social satires and

parodies of “novels of sensibility,” a literary genre in which women like, cry and

sigh and faint a lot.

Many of these early works were in the style of the epistolary novel, which is a story

composed of letters, and we see echoes of that form in Pride and Prejudice.

We also see some echoes of Pride and Prejudice in Austen's life.

She never married, but she did receive at least one proposal that she accepted for a

few hours.

And after her father's death in 1805, her financial position and the positions of her

mother and her sister became increasingly insecure.

By 1816, four of her books had been published.

And she was working on a new novel, called Sanditon, when she died in 1817, at the age

of just 41.

Two more of her works, Persuasion and Northanger

Abbey, were published after her death.

They're all good--but to me at least Pride and Prejudice is the most perfect of them--there's

a precision to it.

Like Gatsby or Sula, Pride and Prejudice is a novel in which every single word feels genuinely

essential.

So what happens in Pride and Prejudice?

well, let's go to the Thoughtbubble: Mr. and Mrs. Bennet live in rural England

with their five daughters: pretty Jane, lively Elizabeth, horrible Mary, airhead Kitty, and

boy obsessed Lydia.

When Mr. Bennet dies the estate will go to a male cousin, so the daughters have to find

rich husbands.

Or else.

Or else live in poverty or become governesses, and if you've read Jane Eyre, you know how

great that gig is.

Mr. Bingley, an eligible bachelor, arrives on the scene, and he and Jane fall in love.

Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Mr. Bingley's best friend, definitely don't.

In fact, Elizabeth sorts of hate him.

Elizabeth gets a proposal of marriage from Mr. Collins, the cousin who's going to inherit

the estate.

And marrying him would save her sisters from poverty, but Mr. Collins is awful and Elizabeth

declines.

So her best friend, Charlotte, ends up snagging him.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth starts to fall for Wickham, a soldier in the militia.

He hates Mr. Darcy, too.

Suddenly Mr. Bingley moves away and Jane is heartbroken.

Elizabeth goes to visit Charlotte and is introduced to Lady Catherine, Mr. Darcy's ultra-snob

aunt.

She sees Mr. Darcy there and he also proposes marriage but in a very insulting way.

She insults him right back.

But some months later, Elizabeth is on a trip with her aunt and uncle.

They visit Mr. Darcy's lavish estate and Elizabeth softens toward him.

Then she gets word that Lydia has run off with Wickham.

Mr. Darcy saves Lydia's reputation by brokering

a marriage.

Then it's happy endings all around: Lydia gets married; Jane and Mr. Bingley get

married, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy get married, Kitty learns to be a little bit less of an

airhead and Mary is presumably still horrible.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

So let's talk life and letters in Regency England.

By the way, Regency England refers to a period from about 1800-1820 when King George III

became mentally ill and unfit to rule.

In England, this was a time of political uncertainty and a lot of economic volatility.

There was a rising middle class, a burgeoning consumer culture, and a move from an agrarian

economy to an industrial one.

And that meant less overall poverty, but it also meant a lot of social instability.

And It was also a time when people in England were beginning to talk about the rights of

women.

Like, Mary Wollstonecraft published “Vindication of the Rights of Women” seven years after

Austen was born, though it's important to remember that at this place and time women

didn't really have many rights--they couldn't vote, and in Pride and Prejudice, the whole

plot begins because all of Bennet's five children are daughters,

This means that legally, Bennet's estate has to go to a male cousin.

But there was a growing belief that hey, maybe women should have rights.

Abroad, the American Revolution and the French Revolution had recently unsettled established

social and political orders.

Everywhere there were increasing discussions about rights and responsibilities, liberties

and duties.

You can even hear this in the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice: “It is

a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be

in want of a wife.”

It has an echo of the American Declaration of Independence: “We find these truths to

be self-evident…”

But the comic deflation in the second half of the sentence is pure Austen.

Some people are initially put off by Pride and Prejudice because they view it as a sort

of literaryfied romance novel.

And, it is a book primarily interested in human relationships, especially romantic ones--but

I'd challenge the idea that such novels can't be great.

Nobody ever argues that picaresque novels,

or bildungsromans, are merely genre novels--even though they are also genres.

But the word “romance” is too often and too quickly dismissed.

By the way, Austen has this completely unearned reputation for being genteel and conservative.

The reality is that her work is very funny and mean and super smart about human behavior.

You can hear that in the letters that survive,

like when she writes to her sister, “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it

saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

But also while this book involves lower-case r romance, it is very aggressively not capital-r

Romantic, in the Byron Wordsworth Shelley sense that feelings are so overwhelming that

they supersede logic.

I mean, Wordsworth can write a hillside for thirty-seven stanzas, but if you read Austen

closely, you'll find that there's a striking absence of physical description.

We don't know what the dresses look like.

We don't know what the people look like.

When there is a physical description, like the description of Mr. Darcy's estate or

Elizabeth's petticoat, it means that something really important is happening.

And even then these descriptions are very brief.

If we're being honest, there isn't even all that much in here about bonnets.

In fact, Austen is suspicious of overwhelming emotion.

Remember how I mentioned the novel of sensibility and Austen's early satires?

She's skeptical of feeling too much, of getting so carried away by emotion that it

prevents you from thinking clearly.

This is exemplified by Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy's relationship.

They don't fall in love at first sight.

Actually, it's the opposite.

At a ball, she overhears him telling his friend that her sister is the only hot girl in the

room and that Elizabeth is merely “tolerable.”

Given that Elizabeth and Darcy are end up together, this is a novel that's suspicious

of romantic love, especially romantic love based on instant physical attraction

and when characters do get carried away by their emotions, they're either fooling themselves,

like Mr. Collins, or doing something really wrong, like Lydia.

Pride and Prejudice does have a wish-fulfilling ending.

but it's still a sly, and ironic and clear-eyed exploration

of the individual vs. the collective, happiness vs. security

It's about love, but rather than presuming

that love is only a feeling, Pride and Prejudice explores how thinking and feeling and need

and responsibility intersect to form the experience that we call love.

One might even say that it's a novel about romantic

love that deconstructs our idea about romantic love.

Austen joked that the scope of her works was narrow, equating her writing with a two-inch

piece of ivory “on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after

much labour.”

She also critiqued of Pride and Prejudice, writing to a friend, “The work is rather

too light & bright & sparkling; it wants shade.”

and yeah, OK, the novel is fun.

But reading should be fun sometimes.

I mean, we already read To the Lighthouse.

And in terms of the prose-style itself, Austen was actually pioneering a new style here called

free indirect discourse.

It means that even though the narration is in the third person, the narrative voice takes

on the thoughts and feelings of characters.

Like after unexpectedly meeting Darcy at

his estate, the third-person narration captures Elizabeth's embarrassment:

“Her coming there was the most unfortunate, the most ill-judged thing in the world!

How strange must it appear to him!

In what a disgraceful light might it not strike so vain a man!

It might seem as if she had purposely thrown herself in his way again!”

This narrative approach reflects emotion without stating it--showing instead of telling, as

the saying goes--and makes us feel not as if we can sympathize with Elizabeth, but instead

as if we ARE Elizabeth,

and to me is one of the most profound and important things a novel can do: Great books

offer you a way out of yourself, and into other peoples' lives.

Next time we'll look more closely at some of the themes, but for now, let's briefly

explore the dilemma facing Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters.

Because her parents have been bad with money, she knows she has to marry well or face poverty.

So when Mr. Collins proposes, that's a fantastic solution.

Except for one thing: She doesn't respect him.

Mr. Collins is pompous and foolish and the very things that make Elizabeth terrific

her lively mind and her fresh wit—make him nervous.

She tells him, “ You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman

in the world who would make you so.”

But the idea that happiness should be privileged over security is pretty radical.

Elizabeth is deciding that her personal individual

happiness should outweigh the economic problems of her family.

She is taking a huge risk when she rejects him.

As Mr. Collins tells her, she's poor so

she probably won't get another proposal.

He might not have made her happy, but he would have made her and her unmarried sisters financially

secure.

And then, Elizabeth takes the same risk or a greater one when she rejects Mr. Darcy's

insulting first proposal.

She can't make herself marry a man she doesn't like.

This was the same dilemma Austen herself faced and her rejection of a suitor made things

hard for herself and for her family.

But she did it anyway.

Now, thanks to the fairy tale ending, Elizabeth doesn't experience, like, catastrophic consequences

as a result of her privileging happiness.

But as 19th century English readers would

have been very well aware, she could have.

And so, the novel helped them, and also helps us, explore when we should put our own needs

first, and when the happiness and security of others is more important.

Is doing what is best for you always the right

thing to do?

Or are there moments when you must sacrifice your happiness for the good of your family

or your social order?

or even yourself? next time we'll discuss whether the politics

of the book are radical or conservative.

And we'll answer a vexing question: Why does Lydia buy such an ugly bonnet?

Thanks for watching.