Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen is one of the greatest novelists of English Literature. She was born in 1775 at Steventon in Hampshire, in the south of England. Her father was Reverend George Austen, who was a well-educated clergyman and who encouraged Austen both in her reading and her writing. She started writing when she was fourteen, and by her early twenties she was already working on the first versions of some of her novels. She did not write about great events, like the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars, both of which happened during her lifetime. Such forces were remote from the restricted world that she depicts. She wrote about what she knew best: the daily business of social visits, romantic affairs, and matchmaking. Her six …show more content…
Farrel (1917) praised Austen for “a most perfect mastery of her weapons, a most faultless and precise adjustment of means to ends”. In my opinion, Austen had a unique skill at creating characters, which was an important part in her novels. Especially in Pride and Prejudice, where the plot development is determined by the characters. It is also important to mention that although human weakness is a prominent element, ranging from Miss Bingley's jealousy to Elizabeth's blind prejudices, outright evil is little in evidence. Austen maintains an attitude of good-humored irony toward her characters. The reader finds various forms of irony in Pride and Prejudice. Sometimes the characters are unconsciously ironic, for example when Mr. Bennet and Elizabeth serve to directly express Austen's own ironic opinion. Another example is when Mr. Bennet turns his wit on himself when Lydia run away with Wickham — "let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough." (p. 161) Elizabeth's irony is lighthearted when Jane asks when she began to love Mr. Darcy. "It has been coming on so gradually that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first