Explained in six sentences
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen, 1813.
Jane Austen's comedy of first impressions, read closely and charted from its own words.
- AuthorJane Austen
- First published1813
- Words121,850
- Chapters61
- Reading time8 h 32 min
Public domain in the US: first published 1813.
In six sentences
Pride and Prejudice, in our own words.
- On the surface it is a story about five sisters who need husbands, but underneath it is about learning to see people clearly, including yourself.
- Austen builds it from conversations, dances, visits and more than 40 letters, while her narrator slips quietly in and out of Elizabeth Bennet's private thoughts.
- The plot runs on a clash between Elizabeth's quick, confident judgments and Mr Darcy's stiff pride, two flaws that stop each of them from reading the other fairly.
- Beneath the wit sits a hard question about money, because a woman of the Bennets' class had few ways to secure her future other than marriage.
- Our sentiment arc stays above zero in all 40 of its slices, a sign of Austen's steady comic tone, though it dips lowest around Chapter 46, when worrying news arrives from home.
- Readers keep coming back for the sparkling dialogue and a heroine who thinks for herself, and its sharp eye for vanity and snobbery has hardly dated in more than two centuries.
Where and when
Hertfordshire, Kent, Derbyshire and London in Austen's own day; she drafted it in 1796 to 1797 and revised it in 1811 to 1812.
- First publisherThomas Egerton
- EditionGutenberg #1342
From the text itself
Three figures, counted from the words on the page.
Every figure is computed by our scripts from the 121,850-word Project Gutenberg text. None is copied from a study guide.
- Ch 21–23Polite letters, quiet setbacks
- Ch 33–35Angry words at Hunsford
- Ch 46Alarming news from home
- Ch 56Lady Catherine's furious visit
We split the novel into 40 equal slices of about 3,000 words and score each by the average VADER sentiment of its sentences, from −1 (most negative) to +1 (most positive); the line is a five-slice moving average, and the dotted line is neutral. Every slice scores above zero, so the dips matter more than the sign. It measures the tone of the words, not what happens.
Computed by us from the Project Gutenberg text · VADER sentiment · 121,850 words
- Elizabeth Bennet752
- Mr Darcy370
- Jane Bennet293
- Mr Bingley217
- Mr Wickham189
This chart counts how often five central characters are named in each twentieth of the book, about 6,100 words, including nicknames and titles such as Lizzy and Miss Eliza for Elizabeth. Pronouns are not counted, so these are name mentions rather than time on the page.
Counted by us from the Gutenberg text · 20 slices of about 6,100 words
Lines join the eight most-named characters, and a thicker line means more paragraphs that name both of them; only the 15 strongest pairs are shown. Elizabeth sits at the center because the story follows her almost everywhere.
Counted by us from the Gutenberg text · paragraph co-occurrence
The cast we counted
8- 01Elizabeth BennetSecond Bennet daughter, witty and quick to judge.
- 02Mr DarcyRich, reserved gentleman whose pride offends the neighborhood.
- 03Jane BennetEldest Bennet sister, gentle and inclined to think well of everyone.
- 04Mr BingleyDarcy's cheerful friend and the new tenant of Netherfield.
- 05Mr WickhamCharming militia officer with a grievance against Darcy.
- 06Lydia BennetYoungest Bennet sister, flirtatious and reckless.
- 07Mrs BennetAnxious mother determined to see her daughters married.
- 08Mr CollinsPompous clergyman cousin who stands to inherit the Bennet home.
Key terms
- Entail
- A legal arrangement that tied an estate to a fixed line of heirs, so it could not simply pass to a man's daughters.
- Free indirect style
- Narration that blends the narrator's voice with a character's private thoughts, without quotation marks.
- Novel of manners
- Fiction that studies the customs, behavior and unspoken rules of a particular social class.
- Accomplishments
- The polite skills, such as music, drawing and languages, that well-off young women were expected to display.
- Militia
- A home-defense regiment; its officers were stationed in country towns and livened up local society.
What we read to write this
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- How 'First Impressions' became 'Pride and Prejudice'
- Pride and Prejudice
- Pride and Prejudice
Our own explanation and figures, written with AI assistance (Claude, by Anthropic) after reading the sources above and checked against the novel's text. No text or images were copied. Published 2026-10-18.
Read the real thing
Pride and Prejudice is free to read.
It is public domain in the US. Project Gutenberg has the full text as a web page, an ebook and plain text.