ANNIVERSARIES
Dec 28, 2021
5 minutes
28 JANUARY 1813
Pride and Prejudice is published
Jane Austen's masterpiece finally reaches the booksellers’ shelves
“It 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 in the autumn of 1796. She was not yet 21, and had not yet published a word. When she read the first version (entitled 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
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