The novel that became Pride and Prejudice was finished in August 1797, when Austen was twenty-one, and immediately rejected by a London publisher who declined to read it. It sat for sixteen years before she held a printed copy in her hands. When that morning finally arrived, on January 29, 1813, she wrote to her sister Cassandra in a register that is not quite pride and not quite relief.

Jane Austen

I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London . . . The Advertisement is in our paper to day for the first time . . . .

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jasna.org, “Pride and Prejudice”

The phrase ‘darling Child’ is the fullest explanation she ever offered for why she wrote it. No manifesto, no stated purpose. Just the feeling of a parent who had waited a long time.

Before the novel had a publisher, and long before it had its final title, she was already guarding it with the instinct of someone who understood exactly what she had. Writing to Cassandra about their friend Martha Lloyd, she tracked the threat with the same dry comic precision that runs through the novel itself.

Jane Austen

I would not let Martha [Lloyd] read First Impressions again upon any account, and I am very glad that I did not leave it in your parr. She is very cunning, but I see through her design. She means to publish it from memory, and one more perusal must enable her to do it. [paraphrased from audio]

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History Calling, “The history of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE | Jane Austen’s most popular book | Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet”

The joke depends on an audience who can follow the irony. Austen’s protectiveness over First Impressions, the manuscript’s original title, was real enough to last through two decades of revision and one publisher’s refusal.

When Austen returned to the manuscript in 1811 and 1812 after Sense and Sensibility found a publisher, she did not tinker at the margins. She described the revision in two words that have since become the most quoted shorthand for her editorial method.

Jane Austen

lop’t and crop’t

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jasna.org, “Pride and Prejudice”

She expected the result to come out shorter than Sense and Sensibility. The compression was intentional, and the two-word phrase is a better description of her aesthetic than any longer account she left.

The title changed during revision too. First Impressions had already been used by another novel published in 1800, so that was gone. The replacement came from Frances Burney’s Cecilia, a novel Austen knew and admired. Then came the financial negotiation with publisher Thomas Egerton, which she settled with characteristic practicality and quiet dissatisfaction.

Jane Austen

I would rather have had £150, but we could not both be pleased, and I am not at all surprised that he [Egerton] should not choose to hazard so much. [paraphrased from audio]

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History Calling, “The history of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE | Jane Austen’s most popular book | Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet”

Egerton paid £110 for the copyright outright. She came to regret the sale. He made considerably more from the novel than she did.

On the day of publication, in the same letter where she named the novel her ‘darling Child,’ she delivered its most precise critical assessment. She had lived with the book long enough to see its quality and its gap at the same time, and she described both without flinching.

Jane Austen

The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story: an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparté, or anything that would form a contrast and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and general epigrammatism of the general style.

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pemberley.com, “Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen”

That self-assessment implies a reader who is paying attention, who can feel the calibration of tone she describes. She made the expectation explicit elsewhere in her letters, in a remark that doubles as a statement of craft principle.

Jane Austen

I do not write for such dull elves as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.

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janefriedman.com, “Writing Lessons from Jane Austen: Cause and Effect in Pride and Prejudice”

The novel does not explain its irony. It depends on the reader arriving with enough alertness to catch what is being done. This was not modesty and not arrogance; it was a working assumption about the contract between writer and reader.

Austen left no letters addressing Pride and Prejudice’s themes in the way a living author might discuss them in an interview. What she left instead is her attachment to Elizabeth Bennet, expressed the day after publication in a tone that reads less like authorial pride and more like something she had not quite prepared herself for.

Jane Austen

I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.

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jasna.org, “Pride and Prejudice”

The feeling is unguarded. She wrote it to Cassandra the morning after the book was out in the world, and the surprise in it is real. Elizabeth was not simply a character she had constructed and released. She was, in some way Austen could only gesture at, a standard.

A week after publication, when the immediate shock of seeing the novel in print had settled, she offered a final accounting of her own reaction to it. It is the last word she left on the subject.

Jane Austen

I do not wonder at your wanting to read First Impressions again, so seldom as you have gone through it, and that so long ago. [paraphrased from audio]

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History Calling, “The history of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE | Jane Austen’s most popular book | Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet”

She had described the book as too light and too sparkling, had regretted the price she accepted for the copyright, and had guarded the manuscript for sixteen years from friends who wanted another look. By the time she wrote this, she was ‘quite vain and well satisfied enough.’ The novel had earned it.