Jane Austen
- Excerpt from Pride and Prejudice
"How very ill Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy," she cried; "I never in my life saw anyone so much altered as she is since the winter. She is grown so brown and coarse! Louisa and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again."
Jane Austen
- Excerpt from Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth, to whom Jane very soon communicated the chief of all this, heard it in silent indignation. Her heart was divided between concern for her sister, and resentment against all the others. To Caroline's assertion of her brother's being partial to Miss Darcy she paid no credit.
Jane Austen
- Excerpt of Pride and Prejudice
The benefit were engaged to dine with the Lucases, and again during the chief of the day was Miss Lucas so kind as to listen to Mr. Collins. Elizabeth took an opportunity of thanking her. "It keeps him in good humour," said she, "and I am more obliged to you than I can express." Charlotte assured her friend of her satisfaction in being useful, and that it amply repaid her for the little sacrifice of her time.
David Cecil
- Excerpt from A Portrait of Jane Austen
I have taken particular pains to set my subject in the context of the period in which she lived. My reason for this is that I come across critics who discuss her and her view of life and character as if they were those of a contemporary of their own. For as we should have learned both from social historians and from common observation, we are largely the creatures of the world we happen to have been born into and our outlook is conditioned by its assumptions and beliefs and...
Simon & Schuster
- Context of Pride and Prejudice
Austen wrote First Impressions in 1796 when the world was in a period of great change. The United States had declared their independence only twenty years earlier and Napoleon was rising to power in France, just across the English Channel from Austen's Britain. Yet none of these significant events are mentioned directly in her work.
