The Immortality of Love in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Love is a word that cannot be given one simple definition. Love is a different thing to different people. Love has extreme powers. It has started great wars, and it can cause people to do unbelievable things. Jane Austen has a very clear opinion on love and personal relationships, and she makes various statements about these personal relationships throughout her novel Pride and Prejudice. In Pride and Prejudice, two sisters who come from a somewhat disrespected family embark on separate journeys where they find true love. Jane, the eldest sister of the Bennet family, develops a romance with a charming rich man named Bingley. Elizabeth, the main character of the story develops feelings of hatred toward a rich snobbish man named Darcy, a man she ends up marrying. Additionally, Austen adds side romances to the novel, depicting very different relationships. While relationships are quite different today, Austen’s theme that love trumps all still exists. It is truly impossible to believe that relationships have not changed at all since Austen’s time. Pride and Prejudice took place in a setting where the male had complete authority over the female, and primogeniture decided who received the family fortune. However, most of Austen’s main points about personal relationships still ring true today. For instance, Austen begins her novel by saying, â€Å"it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife† (Austen 1). People inShow MoreRelatedPrejudice and Pride Illustrated in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein1485 Words   |  6 Pagesin this novel, but pride and prejudice are deeply woven into the thematic core of Mary Shelley’s â€Å"Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus† (Austen). This tormented narrative explores the destructive powers of these two isolating traits. Pride, an unreasonable and inordinate self-esteem and ego, and prejudice, a lack of empathy and negative bias against an individual, both prevent the human characters in â€Å"Frankenstein† from exercising objectivity and openness towards the monster. Pride by the monster’sRead MoreEssay about British Romanticism1831 Words   |  8 Pagesthere were still men in the world motivated by greed and pride. But they did not let this knowledge force them into a state of despondency; instead, they looked forward to the future, when such things might improve (Bernbaum). Romantics hoped that one day mans imagination would awaken and life could be what it was meant to be: free, natural, beautiful, and humane (Bernbaum xxvii). This desire for a natural life came from the Romantics love and admiration of nature. To him, nature was emotionally