First Impressions/Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen began writing a long epistolary novel under the title First Impressions in October 1796. She had previously written stories, but this was her first attempt at a sustained piece of serious fiction. She finished in August of the following year.
That fall, her father inquired at the leading London publishers, Cadell & Davies, as to whether they would be interested in seeing the manuscript, but they declined. Without documentary evidence, it is hard to gague how the twenty-two-year-old Austen took the news. On one hand, she immediately plunged into a new version of her story “Elinor and Marianne,” the work that would ultimately become Sense and Sensibility. On the other, she made no attempt to publish anything for another fourteen years.
While she continued writing stories, reading them aloud to friends and family, it was not until her family settled on her brother’s property that Austen returned to the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. The sophisticated, seasoned author – now in her mid-thirties – set about perfecting the novel that in her naiive enthusiasm she had penned at twenty. (She had called the revision process “lopping and chopping.”)
The new title she chose still reflects the impressions that Elizabeth and Darcy make on each other at their first meeting; her first sentence – “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” – is itself universally acknowledged as one of the greatest beginnings of world literature.
Pride and Prejudice remains Austen’s most popular, most widely translated and most frequently adapted novel, the work that most often gives readers their own first impressions of her wonderfully imagined and exquisitely detailed world. We offer a very rare first edition – one of only 1500 or so copies printed.