Reading Order
Pride & PrejudiceJane Austen Novels Reading Order
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the most beloved of her novels and one of the most widely read novels in the English language — a comedy of manners about Elizabeth Bennet and her four sisters navigating the marriage market in Regency-era England, and Elizabeth's relationship with the proud, initially disagreeable Mr. Darcy. The novel's wit, its romantic tension, and its portrait of female intelligence constrained by social circumstance have made it permanently popular.
Where to start
Pride and Prejudice
Complete Pride & Prejudice Book List
- 1Buy
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen·1813·The source text — written in Austen's early twenties (originally titled 'First Impressions'), published in 1813; begins in medias res with the Bennet family's response to the arrival of the wealthy bachelor Bingley at Netherfield, and proceeds through misunderstandings, letters, and revelations over approximately a year. - 2Buy
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen·1811·Austen's first published novel — two sisters, the practical Elinor and the romantic Marianne, navigate love and disappointment; the Austen novel most concerned with the contrast between feeling and restraint, and the one that most directly parallels Pride and Prejudice in its pairing of contrasting sisters. - 3Buy
Emma
Jane Austen·1815·Austen's most structurally ambitious novel — a young woman of wealth and intelligence who manages her village's social life and constantly misreads the people around her; the novel Austen herself identified as a character that 'no one but myself will much like,' but which many readers now consider her masterpiece. - 4Buy
Persuasion
Jane Austen·1818·Austen's last completed novel — published posthumously; Anne Elliot, at 27, meets the man she was persuaded to reject eight years earlier; the most autumnal and emotionally direct of Austen's novels, and the one that most openly indulges feeling over ironic detachment. - 5Buy
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Brontë·1848·Anne Brontë's novel about a mysterious woman who rents a nearby hall and whose life gradually reveals itself as an escape from an abusive marriage — one of the first English novels to take seriously the question of a woman's right to leave her husband, and a sharp contrast to Austen's more circumscribed social world. - 6Buy
North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell·1855·A young woman from the rural south of England moves to an industrial northern city and comes into conflict with — and eventually grows to love — a proud mill owner; the Victorian novel most directly analogous to Pride and Prejudice in its structure of initial hostility between characters who are each right about aspects of the other and wrong about the rest. - 7Buy
Eligible
Curtis Sittenfeld·2016·Sittenfeld's retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in contemporary Cincinnati — the Bennet family transplanted to modern America, with Liz as a New York magazine writer and Darcy as a neurosurgeon; part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series expanded to include Austen; more faithful to the spirit of the original than most Austen retellings.
Pride & Prejudice — Frequently Asked Questions
In what order should I read Jane Austen?
The standard reading order recommendation is to start with Pride and Prejudice (the most immediately accessible), then move to Emma (the most ambitious), Persuasion (the most emotionally direct), Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey (Austen's Gothic parody, written early but published posthumously), and Mansfield Park (the most morally complex and sometimes the hardest to appreciate on first reading). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together posthumously in 1818. Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon are unfinished or short works worth reading after the six completed novels.
Why is Mr. Darcy so enduringly popular?
Mr. Darcy is the prototype of the 'Byronic hero redeemed by love' that has dominated romantic fiction for 200 years: he is proud, aloof, and initially disagreeable, but his pride turns out to be self-awareness without vanity (he knows his own worth but is embarrassed by his family's behavior), and he is capable of genuine transformation when shown that he has been wrong. His letter to Elizabeth in Volume 2 — one of the great romantic letters in fiction — demonstrates that he is not proud in the sense of being closed to correction; he is also generous, as revealed by his role in resolving the Wickham-Lydia crisis without acknowledgment. The combination of dignity, self-knowledge, and capacity for change is irresistible in a romantic hero, and Austen recognized this with characteristic precision.
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