We Janeites never tire of pointing out all the qualities that make Austen special. We’re not wrong to do so--few writers are as good as she is--but a deeper knowledge of her historical context can shed a different light on what it is that makes her distinctive.
Take, for example, the title of her best-known novel.
Read Pride and Prejudice with zero knowledge of its context, and you’ll likely give Austen credit for catchy alliteration, or ask yourself which character she wants us to see as proud and which as prejudiced.
Read it with a bit more background knowledge, and you may recall that Frances Burney used the phrase at the end of Cecilia, a book Austen admired so much that she name-checked it in Northanger Abbey’s famous defense of the novel. (So . . . no more props to Austen for coming up with that catchy alliteration.)
But according to a recent piece by English scholar Margie Burns, a lecturer at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, the Burney P&P (or should it be p&p?) reference barely scratches the surface.
“The phrase, which has religious origins, appeared in hundreds of works before Austen was born,” Burns wrote recently in the online journal The Conversation. “From Britain it traveled to America, and from religious tomes it expanded to secular works. It even became a hallmark of abolitionist writing.”
Burns’ article, summarizing material from her 2024 book Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase "Pride and Prejudice", traces the history of that evocative title from its origins in the writings of seventeenth-century Anglican ministers through the works of Daniel Defoe, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, and a half-dozen female novelists who preceded Austen. And Burns notes that the fame of Austen's book has eclipsed this entire history
In the piece, Burns doesn’t fully interrogate Austen’s purpose in choosing this well-known phrase as a title, beyond suggesting that she chose it "to honor the phrase and its history." Was Austen ironizing earlier usages by applying a religio-political term to a young woman’s courtship story, or was she seeking to imbue her domestic drama with the gravitas usually conferred on religious and political matters? Was she connecting her story to bigger themes, or did she just enjoy the alliteration?
I don’t have the answer. But if we insist on Austen’s uniqueness to such a degree that we ignore the context that spawned her, we won’t even know to ask the question.
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