PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Beautiful gilt-embossed and golden page-edged purple hardback new gift edition of the classic text. Jane Austen's novels concern the gentle, rural English middle class existence and the conventions of the early 18th century. The book became a family favourite but when her father attempted to place the work with a London publisher, it was rejected. The novel first appeared in print in 1813 and is perhaps the most comic of her novels concerning the considerable efforts of a couple, Mr and Mrs Bennet, to achieve suitable marriages for their five daughters. The focal point is the relationship between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, a man whom she has readily dismissed as an unfeeling aristocrat. It opens with the famous line: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.' A classic of opposites attract. 352pp, fairly small print. New full price edition.