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Elizabeth Bennet stonewalls her way through a disagreeable encounter with Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
In Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh has heard that her wealthy nephew, Fitzwilliam Darcy, is planning to propose to Elizabeth Bennet, instead of her own daughter. She has raced to Longbourn, Elizabeth’s home, to demand an explanation of the ‘impossible’, but Lizzy sees no reason to be defensive.
When she was ten, Catherine Morland showed none of the qualities needed to impress the ladies who read romantic fiction.
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, published after her death in 1817, is a playful swipe at contemporary women’s fiction. She begins by warning us that Catherine Morland had not experienced the kind of childhood — marked by fragile beauty, precocious accomplishments, and sentimental attachments — that fans of romantic fiction expected in their heroines. She was, in fact, perfectly normal.
Now that Mr Willoughby has been found, and found to be married, Elinor Dashwood has the disagreeable task of making sure that her sister feels it is all for the best.
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility turns on the baffling behaviour of Mr Willoughby, who assiduously courts Marianne Dashwood only to vanish from the neighbourhood. When he is finally tracked down in London, he has married a woman of fashion and wealth, and Marianne’s sister Elinor — with every right to a resounding ‘I told you so’ — has to make sure that Marianne and their mother have both accepted the realities.
From the very first lines, Jane Austen’s classic novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pokes affectionate fun at Georgian England.
The opening lines of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813) are arguably the best-loved in all English fiction. In the drawing-room of Longbourn, a gentleman’s residence near the Hertfordshire village of Meryton, pretty but empty-headed Mrs Bennet is all of a flutter because there is a new neighbour in Netherfield Park.
Henry Tilney teases a bewildered Catherine Morland for her lazy vocabulary.
Catherine Morland has been invited for a walk near Bath by Eleanor Tilney and her brother, the Revd Henry Tilney. Henry finds Catherine’s artless simplicity irresistible, but cannot help teasing her; and after she praises her favourite novel, ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’, with a tame adjective, Henry is merciless.
Emma tries to reconcile her father to the unaccountable tastes of his nearest and dearest.
Mild Mr Woodhouse cannot quite forgive Mr John Knightley for carrying off his daughter Isabella as bride, even though he dotes on his little grandchildren Henry and John. It is left to Isabella’s sister Emma to calm his fear that the boys’ father is altogether too rough-and-tumble with them.