ANNIVERSARIES
DOMINIC SANDBROOK highlights
events that took place in January in history28 JANUARY 1813Pride and Prejudice
is published
Jane Austen’s masterpiece finally
reaches the booksellers’ shelves“
I
t is a truth universally acknowledged, that
a single man in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife.” So
begins Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It’s
one of the best-loved novels in the English
language – yet relatively few readers realise just
how long it took her to complete and publish it.
Austen began composing Pride and Prejudice
in the autumn of 1796. She was not yet 21, and
had not yet published a word. When she read the
TUVXGTUKQP
GPVKVNGFFirst Impressions) to her
family, they loved it. Her father, George, even
wrote to a publisher in London, Thomas Cadell,
to ask if he would be interested in printing it.
Cadell simply sent back the letter, marking it
“Declined by Return of Post”.
For several years, First Impressions gathered
dust in a drawer. Then, by around 1811, Austen
took it out again. Though it’s hard to be sure –
the original manuscript is lost – she almost
certainly made considerable alterations, drop-
ping its epistolary format and changing the title
to the now-familiar one. She soon found a
publisher for this new version: Thomas Egerton,
of the Military Library, who paid her £110.
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appearance in the bookshops, bound in three
handsome volumes and priced at 18 shillings.
Though it was hardly an instant bestseller, its
reputation soon began to grow.
“Buy it immediately,”
playwright Richard
Sheridan told a friend,
adding that it was
“one of the clever-
est things” he had
ever read.
MARY^ EVANS/ALAMY
Jennifer Ehle and Colin
Firth in the 1995 BBC
adaptation of Pride and
Prejudice. Jane Austen took
more than 15 years to complete
and publish her best-known novel