It is a truth universally acknowledged that few books are as beloved as Jane Austen’sPride and Prejudice , which was published on January 28 , 1813 . It appears on best - loved literature list across the globe , is a fixture in gamey school schoolroom , and has breed a rabid fan floor and multitudinous flick andtelevision adaptations .
The report of how Miss Elizabeth Bennet ’s disdain for the wealthy , pridefulFitzwilliam Darcyturned to enjoy has never been out of print , and has sold more than 20 million copies since its first appearance more than 200 years ago . Austen ’s family , however , credibly did n’t see much of that success : She sell the novel ’s right of first publication to her publishing house for £ 110 ( just over $ 10,000 in today ’s buck ) and died just a few yr later on , in 1817 . Though the novel was reviewed positively and was well - received by the upper social class at the sentence , it was no far-flung sentience . It was n’t until the 20th century that the playscript and its author were rediscovered and airlift to the rarefied plaza in the English lit pantheon they hold today .
Since then , few Good Book have been reinvent as much and as often asPride and Prejudice : In gain to the aboveboard adaptation for film , television , and stage , the report has been re - lay in twentieth 100 London ( Bridget Jones ’s Diary ) , in Bollywood ( Bride and Prejudice ) , at a Mormon university ( Pride and Prejudice : A Latter - Day Comedy ) , inmodern - daylight Israel , around New York ’s rock scene , during a zombi apocalypse , and put to euphony ( Jane Austen’sPride and Prejudice : A Musical ) .
The account has been re - told from Darcy ’s perspective ( Darcy ’s Story ) , dislodge to America ( Darcy on the Hudson ) , and , of course , transformed into soft - gist Regency - era erotica ( Pride & Prejudice : Hidden Lusts;Pride and Prejudice : The Wild and Wanton Edition ) . It ’s been expanded in C of piece of music of release rooter fiction , from best - sell crime novelist P.D. James’Death add up To PemberleytoMrs . Darcy Versus the Aliens , which is on the nose what it sounds like . In 2009 , Sir Elton John ’s Rocket Pictures even talked aboutproducingPride and Predator , a mash - up pair Regency England with the be - mandibled aliens of thePredatormovies ( regrettably , it never pan off out ) .
But despite how belovedPride and Prejudiceis , there have been stack of people who hat it . Here are seven of them .
1. CHARLOTTE BRONTË
In 1848 , 31 long time after Austen ’s death , Charlotte Brontëpicked upPride and Prejudiceon the testimonial of friend and literary critic George Henry Lewes . Brontë , author of the grim “ romance”Jane Eyre , was n’t backwards about coming forwards with her unfavorable judgment : “ Why do you wish Miss Austen so very much ? I am puzzled on that detail , ” she wrote , explaining that she got the book after Lewes talked it up . “ And what did I chance ? An accurate , daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face ; a cautiously - fenced , extremely - cultivated garden , with neat molding and delicate flowers ; but no glimpse of a bright , intense physiognomy , no open country , no smart air travel , no aristocratical hill , no bonny beck . I should hardly like to hold out with her ladies and man in their elegant but confine houses . ”
Two days afterwards , Brontë accept up the theme again , in a letter of the alphabet to another friend : “ [ A]nything like affectionateness or exuberance , anything energetic , poignant , devout , is perfectly out of place in commending these works : all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well - bred leer , would have sedately scorned as outré or extravagant . She does her business organisation of describe the surface of the life of genteel English people curiously well … [ But ] She no more , with her mind ’s eye , beholds the heart of her race than each valet , with bodily vision , sees the heart in his heaving breast . Jane Austen was a consummate and most sensible lady , but a very uncompleted and rather indiscernible ( not mindless ) womanhood . ”
2. WINSTON CHURCHILL
It ’s a small too strong to say thatWinston Churchillhated Pride and Prejudice , as Britain ’s beloved Prime Minister seems to have found some comfort in the book as the Second World War travail on . But he did have some mild complaint about it : “ What calm lives they had , those people ! No worry about the French Revolution or the break apart struggle of the Napoleonic Wars . Only manners control born love as far as they could , together with ethnical explanations of any mischances . ”
3. RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Ralph Waldo Emerson , having read bothPersuasionandPride and Prejudice , lament the fact that all anyone in the book seemed to care about was money and married couple : “ I am at a departure to empathise why hoi polloi hold Miss Austen ’s novels at so high a pace , which seems to me common in tone , sterile in artistic conception , imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English social club , without genius , wit , or knowledge of the world . Never was life so pinched and so narrow … Suicide is more respectable . ”
4. VIRGINIA WOOLF
In a 1932 letter of the alphabet to a acquaintance , Mrs. DallowayauthorVirginia Woolfhad faint praise for Austen : “ Whatever ‘ Bloomsbury ’ may think of Jane Austen , she is not by any means one of my ducky . I ’d give all she ever wrote for half what the Brontës wrote — if my cause did not compel me to see that she is a splendid creative person . ”
5. D.H. LAWRENCE
D.H. Lawrence , writer ofLady Chatterley ’s Lover(published in 1928 ) , intensely disliked the England Jane Austen represented both in her novels and in person . In 1930 , he wrote , “ This again , is the cataclysm of social biography today . In the onetime England , the curious stemma - connexion hold the classes together . The squires might be arrogant , violent , bullying and unjust , yet in some way , they were at one with the people , part of the same roue - stream . We feel it in Defoe or Fielding . And then , in the mean value Jane Austen , it is gone . Already this older maid typifies ' personality ' alternatively of character , the acute knowing in apartness rather of togetherness , and she is , to my feeling , English in the bad , miserly snobbish sensation of the word , just as Fielding is English in the undecomposed generous sense . ”
6. MADAME ANNE LOUISE GERMAINE DE STAËL
This French - talk Swiss writer , a great patron of the literary salon who live contemporaneously with Jane Austen ( they even died in the same year ) , pronouncedPride and Prejudice"vulgaire . "
7. MARK TWAIN
It was that large American man of letters , Mark Twain , who had the mean thing to say about poor , dead Jane Austen and her book : “ I often want to criticize Jane Austen , but her books madden me so that I ca n’t conceal my frenzy from the reader ; and therefore I have to block every fourth dimension I begin . Every time I readPride and PrejudiceI require to moil her up and overreach her over the skull with her own shin bone bone ! ”
Many thanks to Gary Dexter ’s fabulousPoisoned Pens : Literary Invective from Amis to Zolafor corral a issue of these quotes .
Do you know indication ? Are you eager to know incredibly interesting facts about novelists and their work ? Then pick up our new book , The Curious Reader : A Literary Miscellany of Novels and Novelists , out May 25 !
A version of this fib ran in 2017 ; it has been update for 2021 .
