Literature Review
Pride and Prejudice is considered Jane Austen’s most famous and successful novel. And in many people’s opinion it is also one of the greatest fictions written in English. It contains all the elements necessary for great literature: an attractive plot, a concise style, proper setting, and fascinating characters. Many literature critics write essays to analyze this book and I arrange them in the following logical way.
1. The Most Remarkable Character of Austen’s Work
The most remarkable character of Austen’s work is the accurate descriptions of the details of daily life. As W. F. Pollock (1860) said “Miss Austen never attempts to describe a scene or a class of society with which she was not herself thoroughly acquainted. The conversations of ladies with ladies, or of ladies and gentlemen together, are given, but no instance occurs of a scene in which men only are present.” Austen focuses on daily life of middle-class with humor and understanding. She observes every small matters and every ordinary person in her own life and tries to describe them in her novel. What are important for her are those little matters, as Emma says, “on which the daily happiness of private life depends”. In her time marriage mainly determined women's social status. It is obviously reflected in Pride and Prejudice. The characters of Pride and Prejudice are all ordinary people and the dialogues and events may happen in everyone’s daily life.
Many literary critics have the same idea as W. F. Pollock, such as W.A.N. and Sir Walter Scott .W.A.N. (1815) said ‘The most remarkable characteristic of Jane Austen as a novelist is her recognition of the limits of her knowledge of life and her determination never to go beyond these limits in her books’. In Pride and Prejudice she describes the middle class, with which she is familiar and the part of the country with which she was acquainted. She puts her first-hand observation and experience into this novel to tell us stories about the Bennet sisters. She herself speaks of the "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work". We can take any dialogue from Pride and Prejudice, and you will find it is just like talks in every normal day of that time.
Sir Walter Scott (1826) also evaluated Pride and Prejudice in his journal:
Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of "Pride and Prejudice." That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the delicate touch, which offer ordinary things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the feeling, is denied to me.
2. The Quality of Austen’s Work
W. F. Pollock（1860） also talked about the quality of the novel—“The uniform quality of her work is one of the most remarkable point to be observed in it. Let a literature be opened at any place: there is the same good English, the same refined style, the same simplicity and truth”. When we read Pride and Prejudice we can feel the dialogues humorous and fanny and it shows Austen’s special ability in wording. The characters of Pride and Prejudice are all distinctive. Elizabeth is intelligent, witty and lively. Jane always sees the good of others. So you will find that Austen is so skillful in managing her characters.
It will then be found how great has been the discrimination of Miss Austen in the selection of her characters, and how skillful is her treatment in the management of them. It is true that the events are for the most part those of daily life, and the feelings are those connected with the usual joys; but these are the very events and feelings upon which the happiness or misery of most of us depends; and the field which embraces them, to the rejection of the wonderful, the emotional and the historical, is surely large enough, as it certainly admits of the most profitable cultivation. In the end, too, the novel of daily real life is that of which we are least easy to tired: a round of fancy balls would tire the most vigorous admirers of variety in clothing, and the return to plain clothes would be hailed with greater delight than their accidental abandonment ever gives.
3. The Weakness of Austen’s Work
Austen’s accurate description of the details of daily is also considered a weakness of her work, and even an objection to her. And she has been accused of writing dull stories about ordinary people, especially when her work is compared with those describing the changing times and historical events. But in Pollock’s (1860) view it is just the unique character of Austen’s work. She shows readers a real and vivid picture of her era through these small matters in ordinary people’s ordinary life. There is no grand narrative, but readers can feel it from the dialogues characters make. The description of ordinary people and life is easier to understand.
4. Conclusion of This Paper
This paper is focused on views of Jane and Bingley’s marriage in Austen’s popular novels. The study falls into two categories, Jane and Bingley’s marriage and others’ marriages in her viewpoints, embodied in Chapter Three althougher.
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