Pride and prejudice - Jane Austen

Marrying off marriageable daughters has been the unsettling pastime of mothers since the beginning of time, but no writer has extracted more of the stuff of human wit and kindness than Jane Austen in marrying off the Bennets. In these pages Jane Austen is a realist. Her world may be a microcosm, but how well she knew it! She said of her art that it 'was a little bit of ivory two inches thick' worked over 'with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour'. There are plenty of writers who could and still do give a good account of themselves in 'the big bow-wow style', but there are few who can come within range of this delicate art. There are many pieces of dialogue in fact over which the author must have taken endless and loving care. The conversation of Mr and Mrs Bennet in the opening pages is an instance of this, but the real evidence seems to indicate that writing to Jane Austen afforded her entertainment rather than labour. She looked upon the £150 paid to her for Sense and Sensibility as 'a prodigious recompense for what had cost her nothing'.

Jane Austen's readers have attracted men as well as women: no thoughtful man ever found her trivial. From the opening of her first sentence, exquisitely formed and poised, to the curtain of her last, so curiously satisfying in its summing up, we are privileged to witness the human comedy through the most kindly but nevertheless truthfully observant eyes that ever looked at men and women in love or out of it. The manners may derive from the eighteenth century, but the humanity is for all time.