Elizabeth Bennet's 195th Birthday Party

Pride and Prejudice is 195 years old today. Happy Birthday Lizzy Bennet!

If you are lucky enough to have a first edition in your manor house library, treat it well, because to replace it will cost you a whopping $75,000.00. Or if you look hard enough you might find one just lying about the house!

Here are some interesting facts about the first edition of Pride & Prejudice.

• Payment: Jane Austen sold her manuscript for 110 pounds


• Author: By the author of Sense and Sensibility


• Publisher: Thomas Egerton, London


• Printing: First edition of approx. 1500 copies that sold out in 6 months


• Price: 18 shillings


• History: The novels initial title was First Impressions. It was submitted for publication in 1797 to Cadell & Davies who rejected it without reading it, returning it with "Declined by return post" stamped on the letter. It was later reworked and retitled Pride and Prejudice, after a line in the novel Cecilia, written by Fanny Burney, who Jane Austen admired.

If you are curious how Jane Austen's plucky heroine Lizzy Bennet would function in the modern world with a computer and Google searchabilities, then you might enjoy this charming article Elizabeth Bennet and a Laptop in which Lizzy has the ability to discovery all sorts of information about her prospective beaus and the dirt of the Meryton neighborhood on her laptop all from the comfort of the drawing room at Longbourn.

Posted by Laurel Ann