1 (p. 6) four or five thousand a year: See the Introduction on Austen’s attention to money and class.

2 (p. 8) “When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?”: In the standard edition, R. W. Chapman gives this sentence to Mr. Bennet, arguing that Kitty would already know the date of her sister’s next ball and citing typographical evidence from the first edition of 1813 to support his point (The Novels of Jane Austen; see “For Further Reading”). A reader might, however, expect that Kitty would be more interested in opening a discussion of the ball than would Mr. Bennet. This minor question of attribution points to a characteristic problem that Austen noted in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, when the first edition of Pride and Prejudice was published. Even though Austen assumed that her clever readers would be undaunted by a few obscure lines, she admitted that “a ‘said he,’ or a ‘said she,’ would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear” (Jane Austen: Selected Letters 1796-1817, edited by R. W. Chapman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 132).

3 (p. 19) knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty: Mr. William Lucas’s civic office of mayor has allowed him to express his constituents’ appreciation and concerns in a formal address to King George III. In honor of this occasion and of Mr. Lucas’s civic and economic services to his country, the king has bestowed upon Mr. Lucas a knighthood, which allows him to adopt the title “Sir” during his lifetime. He receives this honor during a ceremony at St. James’s Palace in London, one of the King’s formal residences. Mrs. Lucas now becomes Lady Lucas, but the Lucas children will not inherit the title. A member of Austen’s society would recognize that Lady Lucas does not hold the more prestigious inherited rank of Mr. Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine, because the latter may be called by her first name.

4 (p. 29) entailed . . . on a distant relation: The inheritance of the Bennet property is limited to male heirs. Later in the novel, we learn that Mr. Bennet regrets not having saved part of his disposable income for his wife and daughters. We also learn that the limited resources the Bennet girls will inherit will come from Mrs. Bennet’s marriage portion, which has been invested at a low, but stable, rate of interest. In order to live comfortably, the girls will need to marry well. Among the gentry and aristocracy, the inheritance of an estate (which, in the case of the Bennets, includes the house, grounds, and income-generating farm) was typically governed by the rule of primogenitur entail, through which the eldest son becomes the sole heir to the land and primary heir to most of the financial resources. The intention was to preserve the prestige of the family by having the wealth concentrated in the hands of one man. A smaller financial settlement was typically made for younger sons, who would need to be educated to a profession, and for daughters, who would require a dowry for marriage.

5 (p. 45) the food of love: An allusion to the opening line of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Although Austen only occasionally makes direct references to works of literature, and although she once pointed to her ignorance in a diplomatic effort to decline a suggestion that she write a novel about a learned clergyman, her novels show a solid familiarity with the tradition of English letters and the Bible. In several of her works, she indirectly alludes to Shakespeare’s plays, which, as the character Henry Crawford observes in Mansfield Park, are “part of an Englishman’s constitution.”

6 (p. 65) make us the atonement he thinks our due: To a modern reader, the implication that this “cousin,” earlier described as a “distant relation,” would wish to marry one of the Bennet sisters might seem incestuous. Certainly Lady Catherine’s claim later in the novel that she intends for Mr. Darcy to marry her daughter, who is his first cousin, would seem odd today. In Austen’s time, however, it was not unusual for cousins to marry in order to consolidate the family’s wealth and estate. In Austen’s Mansfield Park, the heroine, Fanny Price, weds her cousin, Edmund Bertram.

7 (p. 67) condescension: Mr. Collins intends this term in a positive light, and such usage is not entirely archaic today (the reader will encounter several terms in the novel that are no longer familiar or whose connotations have changed entirely). To a modern reader, the idea of any person condescending to another is offensive, no matter the difference in station. To a reader of Austen’s day, Mr. Collins’s sentiment would merely seem ridiculous. Austen’s purpose in placing “condescension” in the mouth of the foolish Mr. Collins is not to question the lack of equality between him and Lady Catherine, but to begin to expose the flaws of both characters.

8 (p. 154) the Lakes: The Lake District, in the far northwest of England, remains one of the most picturesque areas of Great Britain. It is associated with the Romantic school of poets, who wrote tenderly of the region. William Wordsworth lived at Dove Cottage near Lake Grasmere in this district from 1799 to 1808 and was visited there by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, and Thomas De Quincey, among others. Although Austen was a contemporary of the Romantic writers, she is generally not considered to have been a part of that school, although inclusion as a Romantic depends partly on one’s definition of the term. Elizabeth’s gleeful response to her aunt’s proposal—“What are men to rocks and mountains?”—is a romantic sentiment, to be sure, but its irony marks Austen’s distance from such emotional effusions.

9 (p. 205) Till this moment, I never knew myself: One of the climactic moments of the novel, Elizabeth’s declaration of sudden self-knowledge is in the tradition of the “recognition” scene (or anagnorisis ) of classical tragedy and Shakespeare. Elizabeth’s initial hubris and her error in judgment—her pride and prejudice—lead her, like a tragic hero, to misread the situation at hand and, after being enlightened, to experience an acute sense of shame. Unlike the tragic hero, Elizabeth learns of her mistake and recognizes her own shortcomings in time to make amends.

10 (p. 234) Matlock, Chatsworth, Dovedale, or the Peak: Mrs. Gardiner has decided to forego these picturesque tourist destinations found chiefly in Derbyshire, the north Midlands county where Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley is situated. The Gardiners have also decided to shorten the trip. To continue to the Lake District would have taken them much farther north than the revised plan, which already takes them a significant distance north and west of London, if we consider that they traveled in a horse-drawn coach on early-nineteenth-century roads. Although Austen does mention Chatsworth in this passage, some scholars have argued that this magnificent estate also provided the model for the fictional Pemberley. Others have suggested that Mr. Darcy, wealthy as he is, could not have supported a manor house and grounds this grand. Today the 35,000-acre estate of Chatsworth, seat of the eleventh Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (whose ancestors acquired most of the land in 1549), remains a popular tourist destination.

11 (p. 239) On applying to see the place: Domestic tourism, which included visits to stately country manor houses listed in guide-books as well as the picturesque countryside, had come into vogue in England during the eighteenth century. A touring party of the gentry class might be admitted to one of England’s great homes at certain stipulated times, often for a fee. The craze for visiting great privately owned estates coincided with the increasing tendency of the upper gentry and aristocracy to “enclose” for exclusive, private use what had previously been common lands, on which the lower classes had been able to farm and hunt for food.

12 (p. 265) gone off to Scotland: After Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, which sought to give consistency to the laws governing marriage and to protect young heiresses and heirs against predatory suitors and upstart brides, couples under the age of twenty-one wishing to marry quickly and without the consent of their parents had to elope to Scotland, where the Marriage Act did not apply. Lydia believes, we soon hear, that she and Wickham will make the long journey to Gretna Green, which is the closest Scottish village to the English border and where speedy weddings had become something of an industry.

13 (p. 286) the death of your daughter would have been a blessing: Mr. Collins’s pompous moralizing complements Mary Bennet’s pedantic observation several pages earlier that “loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable, that one false step involves her in endless ruin.” Relationships out of wedlock were, indeed, fodder for scandal, and a young woman of good family could expect serious consequences to ensue from an extramarital affair, but Austen is also drawing on a formidable literary tradition of melodramatic accounts of the “fallen” or “ruined” heroine, whose fate was usually destitution, illness, and death.

14 (p. 298) Five daughters successively entered the world: One might wonder why the Bennets persisted in having a large family when their financial resources seemed limited and when it was possible to limit the number of children (through, for example, breast-feeding, which had become popular among the middle and upper classes under the reign of Queen Charlotte and which helps to inhibit the rate of conception). This passage suggests that part of the motivation was to have a son who would be able to preserve the estate for the immediate family. Mr. Collins’s legal claim would then no longer be valid.

15 (p. 366) special license: Upper-class couples could be married by special permission of an Anglican bishop and without the otherwise required banns, or public proclamation for three Sundays running, of the intent to marry. Mrs. Bennet regards the procurement of a bishop’s license as a status symbol. However, in an earlier passage, Lydia and Wickham, who do not, in fact, elope to Scotland, are “married privately in town,” which means that interested parties with elite connections in London have procured them a special license to avoid the scandal of a public announcement of this undesirable marriage.

16 (p. 374) the restoration of peace: Possibly a reference to the brief peace between England and France following the signing of the Treaty of Amiens (1802), during which a number of British writers flocked to Paris. The Napoleonic Wars would soon follow. Some scholars believe that this reference suggests that Pride and Prejudice, which was published in 1813, may be set a generation earlier. Austen had indeed written a draft of the novel in the late 1790s but is believed to have substantially revised it in 1811 and 1812. It is possible that the reference applies to some other, less consequential “peace” or to a hope for a future end to the wars, which occurred in 1815.