Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Nominated as one of Americas best-loved novels by PBSsThe Great American ReadIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. So beginsPride and PrejudiceJane Austens witty comedy of mannersone of the most popular novels of all timethat features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the most perfect the most characteristic the most eminently quintessential of its authors works and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.