Pride and Prejudice (For Further Study)

For Further Study

• Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form, Harvard University Press, 1979.

  Brown discusses how Austen uses contrasts between characters, themes, and narrative devices to give structure to her novel.

• Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford University Press, 1975, reprinted with new introduction, 1987.

  Butler argues that despite the tendency of many readers and critics, Austen's novels are not "progressive" novels, but rather novels that reinforce a conservative, orthodox thinking in tune with her era.

• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press, 1979.

  Gilbert and Gubar explore the struggles nineteenth-century women writers endured while publishing their works and how society reacted to the ideas and perspectives of women authors.

• J. David Grey, managing editor, A. Walton Litz and Brian Southam, consulting editors, The Jane Austen Companion, Macmillan, 1986.

  The Jane Austen Companion was published under the auspices of the Jane Austen Society and includes much scholarly information, including a chronology of Austen's life and works, her family tree, critical appraisals of her novel, and a Dictionary of Jane Austen's Life and Works, a concordance of important people and events in her fiction and her world.

• Karl Kroeber, "Pride and Prejudice: Fiction's Lasting Novelty," in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, edited by John Halperin, Cambridge University Press, 1975.

  In this essay Kroeber looks at the phenomenon of Austen's continuing popularity despite the ways in which she goes against prevailing modern literary tastes.

• Robert Liddell, "Pride and Prejudice," in his The Novels of Jane Austen, Longmans, 1963, pp. 34-55.

  In his collection, Liddell studies various aspects of Pride and Prejudice, including its history, social background, and irony.

• Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

  Poovey writes about the role of women writers in society during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

• Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, St. Martin's, 1979.

  In this study, Roberts traces the impact that the French Revolution had on Austen's own life (her brothers served in the Royal Navy in the struggle against Napoleon Bonaparte) and on the type of fiction she wrote.

• LeRoy W. Smith, "Pride and Prejudice: No Improper Pride," in his Jane Austen and the Drama of Woman, Macmillan, 1983, pp. 87-110.

  This essay concentrates on the social, moral, economic, and sexual dilemmas Elizabeth must face as a middle-class woman in nineteenth-century society.

• Michael Williams, Jane Austen: Six Novels and their Methods, St. Martin's, 1986.

  Williams discusses six Austen novels, including Pride and Prejudice, and concentrates on the methods Austen uses to construct her stories.