Margie Burns, author of the new book Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice’, summarizes her findings for The Conversation:
While 2025 marks Austen’s 250th birthday, the phrase “pride and prejudice” first appeared more than 400 years ago, in religious writings by English Protestants. As the daughter, sister, cousin and granddaughter of Church of England ministers, Austen was certainly aware of the tradition.
If ministers wanted to reproach their parishioners or their opponents, they attributed criticism of their sermons to “pride and prejudice” – as coming from people too arrogant and narrow-minded to entertain their words in good faith.
While the usage began in the Church of England, other denominations, even radical ones, soon adopted it: “Pride and prejudice” appears in the writings of Nonconformists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Dissenters and other representatives of “Schism, Faction and Sedition,” as one anonymous writer called them. One early takeaway is that, amid fervent religious conflicts, various denominations similarly used “pride and prejudice” as a criticism. […] At the same time, the phrase could be invoked to support religious toleration and in pleas for inclusiveness. […]
In the 18th century, advances in publishing led to an explosion of secular writing. For the first time, regular people could buy books about history, politics and philosophy. These popular texts spread the phrase “pride and prejudice” to even more distant shores.
One fan was American founding father Thomas Paine. In his 47-page pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine argued that kings could not be trusted to protect democracy: “laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government[,] that the crown is not as repressive in England as in Turkey.” […]
After the philosophers, the historians and the political commentators came the novelists. And among the novelists, female writers were especially important. My annotated list in “Jane Austen, Abolitionist” includes more than a dozen female writers using the phrase between 1758 and 1812, the year Austen finished revising “Pride and Prejudice.”
Click through for more details; I had no idea of any of this. Thanks, Bathrobe!
Pride and prejudice are sly persuaders. Here the epigraph to Nick And Charlie:
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“Yes, very indifferent indeed,” said Elizabeth, laughingly. “Oh, Jane, take care.”
“My dear Lizzy, you cannot think me so weak, as to be in danger now?”
“I think you are in very great danger of making him as much in love with you as ever.”
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The context of this reader’s double-take at the beginning of Chapter 54:
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As soon as they were gone, Elizabeth walked out to recover her spirits; or, in other words, to dwell without interruption on those subjects which must deaden them more. Mr. Darcy’s behaviour astonished and vexed her.
“Why, if he came only to be silent, grave, and indifferent,” said she, “did he come at all?”
She could settle it in no way that gave her pleasure.
“He could be still amiable, still pleasing to my uncle and aunt, when he was in town; and why not to me? If he fears me, why come hither? If he no longer cares for me, why silent? Teasing, teasing man! I will think no more about him.”
Her resolution was for a short time involuntarily kept by the approach of her sister, who joined her with a cheerful look which showed her better satisfied with their visitors than Elizabeth.
“Now,” said she, “that this first meeting is over, I feel perfectly easy. I know my own strength, and I shall never be embarrassed again by his coming. I am glad he dines here on Tuesday. It will then be publicly seen, that on both sides we meet only as common and indifferent acquaintance.”
“Yes, very indifferent, indeed,” said Elizabeth, laughingly. “Oh, Jane! take care.”
“My dear Lizzy, you cannot think me so weak as to be in danger now.”
“I think you are in very great danger of making him as much in love with you as ever.”
They did not see the gentlemen again till Tuesday; and Mrs. Bennet, in the meanwhile, was giving way to all the happy schemes which the good-humour and common politeness of Bingley, in half an hour’s visit, had revived.
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Note “involuntarily”.
My question has always been what the connection was to the earlier title “Sense and Sensibility,” which seems like a less common and less natural construction.
Delightful to think of someone picking up this book expecting a tract and getting schooled by Elizabeth and Jane Bennet instead.
The title is Nick And Charlie, not L’Être et le Néant. So I dunno about expecting a tract, but I know what you mean.
Until this latest Hat post, I had merely taken note of the epigraph, and put off finding the context (it’s been decades since I last read P&P). Now that I have it, I see that it has a rather subtle (aka tenuous) connection to the N&C plot – one you get only if you know P&P in and out (or check up in the ‘net). And of course have committed N&C to random-access memory, which I have.
But is not necessary to have read Austen to appreciate the book. Oseman is a very interesting writer.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AlliterativeTitle/Literature lists no other titles of the format “AbstractNoun1 and AbstractNoun2”. I guess Jane spoiled it for everyone else.
Searching a pre-Austen date range for the phrase in the google books corpus turns up Gibbon as another secular writer who used it. But the primary benefit of such a search is the over-the-top titles of the sort of religious works (often factional/controversial) that it turns up in.
Start slowly with the bland-but-intimidating-sounding THE WORKS OF the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson* LATE Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: CONTAINING Two Hundred Sermons and Discourses, On SEVERAL OCCASIONS. To which are Annexed [etc etc etc]. Together with [etc etc etc.]. VOLUME the First.
Then get crazy with the polemical poem Anti-Boreale. AN ANSWER TO That Seditious and Lewd piece of Poetry, UPON Master Calamy’s late Confinement, Supposedly His who wrote ITER BOREALE.**
Go back another decade-plus beyond that and you get the suspiciously-modern-sounding Θεολογια ᾽Εκλεκτικε. A DISCOURSE OF THE LIBERTY OF PROPHESYING. SHEWING The Unreasonableness of prescribing to other Mens FAITH, and the Iniquity of Persecuting Differing OPINIONS.***
*1630-94, and archbishop beginning in 1691, after his predecessor was deprived for being so weirdly principled that he would not abandon his loyalty to the deposed James II despite the fact that James had had him locked up in the Tower of London, which itself had been part of one of the popular grievances leading to James’ downfall from power.
**A handwritten note on the copy they scanned attributes authorship to Robert Wild/Wilde/Wylde (1617-1679), who is commonly said to have authored ITER BOREALE, so this makes sense if Anti-Boreale is actually aligned with rather than opposing that work? Master Calamy must have been the one wikipedia calls Edmund Calamy the Elder, who would have been a factional ally of Wild’s – both royalist in politics and strong supporters of the Restoration yet both so obstinately Presbyterian in ecclesiology that they got ejected from their livings in 1662.
***By the saintly Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), who was so anti-Presbyterian that he got made a bishop (in Ireland, where they sometimes posted the extremists …) at the Restoration but who at the time he wrote it in 1647 was himself suffering persecution at the hands of Presbyterians/Cromwellians which may have given him a broader perspective on such matters.
Yes, it was originally intended to be The Unreasonableness of other Mens FAITH, and the Iniquity of Differing OPINIONS, but he had second thoughts.
[N.b.: That was a joke. Do not base your dissertation on it.]
@mollymooly: Black Adder the Third* episode titles:
The third series is the weakest point in the show’s history, but it has its moments. The last two episodes, featuring return appearances by Miranda Richardson** and Stephen Fry, respectively, are especially entertaining.
* The YouTube video turns to loud garbage at 0:36.
** For a long time, her best known roles to Americans were probably the scatterbrained Queenie from Blackadder II and the terrifying Jude from The Crying Game—both psychopathic, but otherwise very, very different.
All happy people are alike. Each psychopath is psychopathic…
While I concede that that Lev Nikolayevich shows some talent as a novelist, I’ve never actually been persuaded by that most famous of opening lines (artistically effective though it is.)*
Happy families actually come in all kinds of different shapes, whereas the failure modes tend to be often all too similar to one another and sadly familiar. There’s a limited playbook.
(It’s Tolstoy’s own gifts that makes one of those standard stories into great art, not intrinsically remarkable subject matter.)
* Jane Austen and Herman Melville do even better, of course.
Best ever last line is in Intruder in the Dust. Sums up exactly why it’s so much better than To Kill a Mockingbird.
OTOH, the train wrecks usually make for much more entertaining novels than descriptions of domestic bliss.
Are there any novels that consist of descriptions of domestic bliss?
Little Women seemed to me to contain an incredibly low level of bitchfighting (compare Jane Austen writing a bit earlier) and a healthy shared hero worship of the father (it may have helped that he was not physically present). These elements would appear to be necessary in any happy families novel, but are currently not on an upward trajectory in society.
Are there any novels that consist of descriptions of domestic bliss?
In Doctor Thorne, Trollope says: “… the sweet bliss of connubial reciprocity is not so common as it should be among the magnates of the earth.” The magnates referred to here are Dr. and Mrs. Proudie.
By way of corny lagniappe, see here.
By way of corny lagniappe, see here.
That still gets a chuckle out of me after all these years!
Are there any novels that consist of descriptions of domestic bliss?
There’s at least Stifter’s Nachsommer.
Quite a number of novels feature happily married couples, but (naturally) they are not about the happily-married-ness.
Jules and Louise Maigret seem pretty happy. Nick and Nora Charles are positively sickeningly sweethearts.
Jules and Louise Maigret seem pretty happy.
I never knew her first name, and only vaguely remember his, despite having read quite a few of the roman policiers.
Within the bounds of what appears to be an extremely conventional-for-the-1930s-on (French) setup, they get along well. I find it rather .. well, premodern and wishful-thinky. The function of this setup is to not distract the reader from the commissaire‘s adventures and mysterious intuitions.
She demands nothing of him, always accedes without complaint to his comings and goings at all hours, is forever cooking his favorite dishes etc. What a sad choice – play second fiddle to a man, or else become a successful cat lady executive. Oh well, none of my business. Much of it is probably just media exaggeration.
Nick and Nora Charles are positively sickeningly sweethearts.
As it says here:
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Nick and Nora Charles never worry about money, politics, or viruses. They sleep in, drink all day and solve crimes at night. Who wouldn’t want to be Nick and Nora?
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Are there any novels that consist of descriptions of domestic bliss?
i think @PlasticPaddy is barking up a right tree, but the wrong branch: Little Men is right there!
there’s a fair amount of le guin that fits, too. the novella “Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea”, for example, much of Always Coming Home, and (more complicatedly) the last few Earthsea books’ account of ged and tenar’s later years.
delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders and Shoat Rumblin are also right in the pocket – and i’d be willing to argue for the dyethsome sections of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, too.
This seems to be a good place to bring this up:
Abstract : [We] bring together two brilliant analysts of social encounters, Jane Austen and Erving Goffman. I [The paper] proceeds by applying some of Goffman’s terms for face-to-face interactions to several scenes from Austen’s novels in which characters try to extract information from others while preventing others from extracting information from them. In their treatment of these “expression games,” both authors display a similar sociological sensibility. They differ, however, in their treatment of the individual in relation to society; for Austen, an individual can never be viewed apart from family and connections, while for Goffman, the individual is in and of itself a sacred social entity.
,
Anthropology and Humanism 25 April 025, Richard Handler
Expression games in Jane Austen and Erving Goffman: “Family and connections” versus “solitary cultish men”
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anhu.70009 Open Access
[Thanks to our Hat for help: I’d lost the thread, couldn’t recall where it started,,,]
It’s remarkable that it took Le Guin most of her life to start making fictional versions of the domestic bliss she had been living since 1958 if not earlier. But she was never one for “write what you know”.
In one of her essays she wrote that someone had asked what she thought the overarching theme of her work was, and she replied spontaneously “Marriage”. She added in the essay that she didn’t think she had written anything worthy of that theme yet. Her time would come…
I would add to rozele’s list Le Guin’s 2008 novel Lavinia, which while it is not about domestic bliss is certainly about marriage (of the title character to Aeneas).
i still haven’t read Lavinia, somehow – thanks for the reminder, JC!
and i think you’re quite right: to my eye, it’s part of what she wrote and spoke about more directly in relation to gender, which i’d elaborate to be about how as a writer, she in a certain sense came from deep within the Literary Tradition in a way that made it hard for her to imagine protagonists that weren’t men, and stories that weren’t Tales Of Men’s Doings Out In The World, which meant that the things that were the fabric of her own life weren’t possible subjects. she did wind up doing that slantwise, even early on, but wasn’t able to step beyond it until much later (and when she did, her critical/theoretical writing, like “The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction”*, reflects that shift beautifully: “That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.”).
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* i don’t even find the brief just-so story excursion too annoying, though i think there’s some undigested proto-evo-psych/sociobio nonsense in it.
Yes, a good essay; for those who want to skip the (not so brief) just-so story, here’s the nub of it, with which I entirely agree:
I love Lavinia. It reimagines the romans before they were romans, when they were cattle-rustling IndoEuropeans, and I imagine it is a kind of personal farewell from Le Guinn.
Steven Brust isn’t often compared to Le Guin, but he’s quoted as saying
That’s apparently from an interview in Strange Horizons. I’m not sure the last sentence is from the same source. And since I don’t want to give a false impression—the list of things he thinks are cool would be long and would even include various things found in literary novels.
Le Guin was certainly prone to writing about whatever she thought was cool at a given point in her life.