Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

The complete text of Jane Austen’s second-published novel, in 61 chapters across three original volumes. The hosting follows Austen’s own structural division — the same three-act shape as the original 1813 publication.

Read the novel

Volume 2

Volume 3

Mr. Darcy on screen — the firth.com connection

The 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, written by Andrew Davies and starring Colin Firth as Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, is widely considered the most consequential single Austen production in screen history. The famous lake-scene moment — not in the novel, added by Davies — reset the popular understanding of Darcy and made Firth a cultural reference point. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, published the year after the BBC broadcast, openly took Firth’s Darcy as the partial template for her Mark Darcy — whom Firth then went on to play in three films.

Our sister site firth.com/austen/ traces the cultural thread from the 1813 novel to the 1995 lake scene to Bridget Jones — with full chronology, gallery and on-record press archive.

About this novel

Pride and Prejudice was published anonymously on 28 January 1813 by Thomas Egerton, with the title page reading “by the author of Sense and Sensibility.” Austen had begun the novel as First Impressions in 1796–97, when she was twenty-one. Her father offered it to a London publisher in November 1797 and was rejected by return of post. She rewrote it during 1811 and 1812, after the success of Sense and Sensibility.

The novel sold its first edition of about 1,500 copies and a second edition was issued the same year. It has never been out of print.

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