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:
“All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)