Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) [Unabridged] [Mass Market Paperback]

Jane Austen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0553213105 | ISBN-13: 978-0553213102 | Publication Date: December 1, 1983 | Edition: 2nd

For over 150 years, Pride And Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen herself called this brilliant work her "own darling child." Pride And Prejudice, the story of Mrs. Bennet's attempts to marry off her five daughters is one of the best-loved and most enduring classics in English literature. Excitement fizzes through the Bennet household at Longbourn in Hertfordshire when young, eligible Mr. Charles Bingley rents the fine house nearby. He may have sisters, but he also has male friends, and one of these—the haughty, and even wealthier, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy—irks the vivacious Elizabeth Bennet, the second of the Bennet girls. She annoys him. Which is how we know they must one day marry. The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and Darcy is a splendid rendition of civilized sparring. As the characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, Jane Austen's radiantly caustic wit and keen observation sparkle.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Elizabeth Bennet is the perfect Austen heroine: intelligent, generous, sensible, incapable of jealousy or any other major sin. That makes her sound like an insufferable goody-goody, but the truth is she's a completely hip character, who if provoked is not above skewering her antagonist with a piece of her exceptionally sharp -- but always polite -- 18th century wit. The point is, you spend the whole book absolutely fixated on the critical question: will Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy hook up?

From Library Journal

Austen is the hot property of the entertainment world with new feature film versions of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility on the silver screen and Pride and Prejudice hitting the TV airwaves on PBS. Such high visibility will inevitably draw renewed interest in the original source materials. These new Modern Library editions offer quality hardcovers at affordable prices.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Bantam Classics; 2nd edition (December 1, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553213105
• ISBN-13: 978-0553213102
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.8 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,269 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #83,072 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #17 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( A ) > Austen, Jane
  • #82 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > British > Classics

More About the Author

Though the domain of Jane Austen's novels was as circumscribed as her life, her caustic wit and keen observation made her the equal of the greatest novelists in any language. Born the seventh child of the rector of Steventon, Hampshire, on December 16, 1775, she was educated mainly at home. At an early age she began writing sketches and satires of popular novels for her family's entertainment. As a clergyman's daughter from a well-connected family, she had an ample opportunity to study the habits of the middle class, the gentry, and the aristocracy. At twenty-one, she began a novel called "The First Impressions" an early version of Pride and Prejudice. In 1801, on her father's retirement, the family moved to the fashionable resort of Bath. Two years later she sold the first version of Northanger Abby to a London publisher, but the first of her novels to appear was Sense and Sensibility, published at her own expense in 1811. It was followed by Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). After her father died in 1805, the family first moved to Southampton then to Chawton Cottage in Hampshire. Despite this relative retirement, Jane Austen was still in touch with a wider world, mainly through her brothers; one had become a very rich country gentleman, another a London banker, and two were naval officers. Though her many novels were published anonymously, she had many early and devoted readers, among them the Prince Regent and Sir Walter Scott. In 1816, in declining health, Austen wrote Persuasion and revised Northanger Abby, Her last work, Sandition, was left unfinished at her death on July 18, 1817. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral. Austen's identity as an author was announced to the world posthumously by her brother Henry, who supervised the publication of Northanger Abby and Persuasion in 1818.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

450 of 490 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece of Wit and Style, A Timeless Work for the Ages, June 11, 2002

By 

Gary F. Taylor "GFT" (Biloxi, MS USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

Jane Austen is one of the great masters of the English language, and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is her great masterpiece, a sharp and witty comedy of manners played out in early 19th Century English society, a world in which men held virtually all the power and women were required to negotiate mine-fields of social status, respectability, wealth, love, and sex in order to marry both to their own liking and to the advantage of their family. And such is particularly the case of the Bennetts, a family of daughters whose father's estate is entailed to a distant relative, for upon Mr. Bennett's death they will lose home, land, income, everything. But are the Bennett daughters up to playing a winning hand in this high-stakes matrimonial game without forfeiting their own personal integrity?

This battle of the sexes is largely seen through the eyes of second daughter Elizabeth, who possesses a razor-sharp wit and rich sense of humor--and who finds herself hindered by her own addlepated mother, her sister Jane's hopeless love for the wealthy Mr. Bingley, and her sister Lydia's penchant for scandal... not to mention the high-born, formidable, and outrageously proud Mr. Darcy, who seems determined to trump her every card. But the game of love proves more surprising than either Elizabeth or Mr. Darcy can imagine, and sometimes a seemingly weak hand proves a winning one when all cards are on the table.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is simply one of the funniest novels ever written, peopled with memorable characters brought vividly to life as they both succeed and fail at the game of life according to the manners of their era. It is a novel to which I return again and again, enjoying Austen's brillant talent. I have little respect for people who describe it as dull, slow, out of date, for as long as men and women live and fall in love it will never be out of style, always be meaningful, and always be funny. A masterpiece of wit and style; a timeless novel for the ages.

200 of 219 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Check the Publisher carefully before you place your order because...., July 8, 2010

By 

Kiwi (Mississauga, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Pride and Prejudice (Paperback)

One of the versions listed is published by "General Books LLC." Another reader complained about the tiny and almost unreadable font - you probably bought the version published by General Books LLC - and here's the reason.

General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Publishing, (google them and take a look at the Wikipedia article on them) and they specialise in publishing books that are free of copyright without doing any editing or quality control. A few quotes from the publishers website will explain more:

"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos....

After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price....

Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....

We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies..... "

So what you're getting if you buy the version published by General Books LLC is a scanned in, unedited, low quality (and with an almost unreadable font from the sounds of it) unindexed / No table of contents book at a higher price than many of the good quality imprints available. Basically, VDM Publishing is flooding Amazon with these low quality prints (450,000 of them are listed now) and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with better quality imprints associated with them. The product description is insufficient for the buyer that's not aware of this publisher.

Totally unethical marketing.

A reader,Scott Hannigan has commented: "What you have given us is feedback - not a review. There is an appropriate forum for your complaints. You should delete it as it brings down the average score of a classic." In response, I have to say that Amazon does not provide a forum for complaints and has been remarkably resistant to taking on board criticism from many customers over the books published by General Books LLC. In addition, Amazon is the Printer of these POD books and makes a substantial cut from them. Sadly, given that the General Books LLC version is lumped in with other imprints from genuine publishers, there is no real way of making potential buyers aware of the problems with this particular version of the book without inflicting it on all the other versions available. C'est la vie.

Scott - apologies for replying like this but Amazon removed my ability to comment some time ago - I broke ze commenting guidelines. Re "Amazon does provide a feedback section. You will find it under 'My Account', 'Personalization', 'Leave Seller Feedback'" - yes, they do indeed but the response to myself and many others has been uniformly that it's not their problem. Look up the discussion forum on Alphascript Books for a very enlightening backgrounder on this one. That said, if you bought a book from General Books LLC and saw what it was like, you'd be highly annoyed - as most buyers have been - and even if you returned it to Amazon for a refund, you'd be out of pocket for the postage.

137 of 152 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, Kindle version poor, August 4, 2010

By 

Lisa (Hawai'i) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pride and Prejudice (Kindle Edition)

It goes without saying Pride and Prejudice is a classic of all time. My concern here and the reason for the low rating is the poor quality of this Kindle version. There are typos and in several places in the text very, very simple errors are made: in a few places, the same word repeats itself along the lines of "the the chair," a couple malapropisms I am positive were not in the original text, and other typesetter's error that, if this Kindle edition had been subject to even a cursory review by a proofreader, would have been caught. I too would like to mention the FACT that emphasized WORDS are all CAPITALIZED in this version as AMAZINGLY annoying. I have never seen an actual book loaded with so many simple errors as this ebook is.