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Pride & Prejudice – page 4

S Y N O P S I S

Elizabeth Bennet is the second of five sisters in a family whose

estate will pass to a distant cousin, which makes marriage less

a matter of sentiment than of survival. When a wealthy young

man takes the neighbouring house and brings a proud friend

with him, Elizabeth forms a judgement of that friend within

an evening and spends the rest of the novel discovering what

it cost her. Austen writes the courtship plot as a comedy of

observation: the misreadings are funny before they are painful,

and the wit belongs to the characters rather than to the narrator.

What changes, in the end, is not circumstance but the quality of

attention two people pay each other.