Title
The title "Pride and Prejudice" is very likely taken from a passage in Fanny Burney's popular 1782 novel Cecilia, a novel Jane Austen is known to have admired:
- "The whole of this unfortunate business," said Dr. Lyster, "has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. ... Yet this, however, remember: if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination..."
The terms are also used repeatedly in Robert Bage's influential 1796 Hermsprong.
An earlier occurrence still is to be found in Chapter II of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in 1776. In the discussion of slavery the following sentence appears: "Without destroying the distinction of ranks, a distant prospect of freedom and honours was presented, even to those whom PRIDE AND PREJUDICE almost disdained to number among the human species".
Read more about this topic: Jane Bennet
Famous quotes containing the word title:
“The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men?—if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“That title of respect
Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)