Pride & Prejudice – a novel of social conventions

Austen’s life was even less eventful than that of her characters. The first twenty five years of her life she spent in Hampshire. „The uneventfulness of her middle-class existence” was rarely interrupted by visits to Bath – the fashionable watering place in the South of England. Upon her father’s retirement in 1801, the family moved to this socially esteemed spa city of Bath, which provides the setting for many of her novels. While in Bath, she fell in love with a man she met at the seashore, but he died suddenly soon afterwards. Then she traveled with her sister to visit a young, clumsy man named Harris Bigg-Wither, who asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted his proposal, slept fitfully, and the following morning awoke to do something that was literally unheard of in her day. She told him she had changed her mind. She went on to live the rest of her life unmarried. After the death of her father in 1805, Austen, her sister, and her mother lived in Southampton with her brother Frank and his family for several years before moving to Chawton in 1809. Here her wealthy brother Edward had an estate with a cottage, where he allowed his mother and sisters to live. Austen published her first book, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811. The title page said only that the book was written „by a lady” and nobody outside of her family knew who the real author was. She began working on a revised draft of Pride and Prejudice, writing on a table in the drawing room and hiding her notebooks whenever she heard someone coming. Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, and it became a sensation with the British public.