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Pride and Prejudice Is Concerned with Various Aspects of Love and Marriage. Discuss.

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Pride and Prejudice Is Concerned with Various Aspects of Love and Marriage. Discuss.
Q. Pride and Prejudice is concerned with various aspects of love and marriage. Discuss. “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen, was written in 1797, when women were still dependent on men for their livelihood and marriage was a tool for women of the time to get settled in comfortable households. During the turn of 19th century in England, balls were one of the places to socialise, in other words, an opportunity for most young women to look for suitable husbands. Many of the Jane Austen novels centre on the theme of love and marriage, and it can be said that it presents to us the social history of England. Raymond Williams said, “Austen’s novels provide an accurate record of that moment in English history in which bourgeois society most evidently interlocked with an agrarian capitalism.” Austen’s Emma is a case in point in which the lead heroine is a match maker and though she herself vows not to marry but eventually falls in love with George Knightley who is the owner of an estate. Similarly, in other Austen novels, the story revolves around men and women interacting and socialising, and leads to an end where the heroine is happily married. Pride and prejudice is not free from such a theme, while marriage is a big concern, we also see development of love and the growth of relationships especially between Jane and Bingley, Elizabeth and Darcy. Pride and Prejudice starts with the comment, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This clearly sets out the pace of the story and we come to know that men with property are being highlighted. Mrs Bennet with five daughters to take care of and who also wants to protect her future after her husband’s death, feels it a great responsibility to marry off her daughters in well off households. So, when she hears of a Mr Bingley with ‘four or five thousands a year’, she pesters Mr Bennet to meet him for the sake of her daughters. This shows how she
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