Society in Pride and Prejudice

Society in Pride and Prejudice

  • Submitted By: cnelson
  • Date Submitted: 05/24/2008 2:29 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 6182
  • Page: 25
  • Views: 7

Using ‘Pride and Prejudice' discuss how society viewed the ideas of love and marriage.

Jane Austen was born in 1775 in the village of Stevenson in Hampshire. She was the seventh of eight children and the daughter of Revered George Austen and his wife Cassandra. From a very young age Jane Austen was encouraged and enjoyed to write, and the reading she did in her father's extensive library resulted in a love of literature. At the age of 14 Jane Austen wrote her first novel "Love and Friendship" yet it wasn't until 1811 when she was 36 that she had her first book published. She never married and was a strong believer in marrying for love. She rejected a marriage proposal from a wealthy landowner and after her parents died spent the majority of her life living with her brothers on their estates. "Pride and Prejudice" her most famous book, was published in 1813 and can be viewed as a satire of the patriarchal society that she lived in. The book received huge praise and is still loved today. The first sentence, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife,' establishes the main themes that Austen will explore in the novel: love, marriage and social status. This sentence is typical of Austen's ironic style of writing and an example of how she uses satire to mock certain groups of people. Jane Austen knows that it is very presumptuous to assume that a single man of large fortune must want a wife and she also knows that this fact is not ‘universally acknowledged.' Instead of this being Austen's point of view it is in fact the belief of mothers, such as the character of Mrs Bennet. The way in which Jane Austen states the opposite of her beliefs and exaggerates this point of view makes it seem ridiculous, this irony and wit adding humour to the book.

During the early 1800's it was not common that people would marry for love and more likely that they would marry for more...

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