`Author:` `Availability:` > [!info] > ## Key Takeaways ## Summary ## Quotes - ## Notes Pride and Prejudice critiques social class and prejudice, but it does so within certain limits. Elizabeth Bennet, while from a modest family, is still a gentleman’s daughter, giving her some social footing within the Regency-era hierarchy. Austen never places her heroine on the farthest end of the economic spectrum. If Elizabeth were truly impoverished, perhaps a servant or the daughter of a laborer, her relationship with Darcy would indeed be almost unthinkable. The social gap would likely be too wide for Austen’s society to envision any sort of reconciliation—let alone a happy ending. This setup raises questions about Austen’s own critique. By keeping Elizabeth’s social standing within the gentry, Austen is perhaps protecting her characters—and her readers—from confronting deeper, more entrenched forms of prejudice. It’s as though she’s saying, “Let’s critique society, but within limits, within a space that can still entertain the possibility of a happy resolution.” Had she dramatized a greater social divide, the “pride” and “prejudice” could well have proved insurmountable, creating a more tragic, or perhaps more bitterly realistic, narrative. So while Austen offers a critique, it’s within a framework her readers could tolerate and perhaps even sympathize with, exposing only those prejudices that the upper and middle classes might be willing to reconsider. Had she pushed those boundaries further, by giving Elizabeth a truly marginalized background, the novel might have lost its romantic appeal or, more likely, faced even greater resistance from readers of her time. It’s a critique, yes, but a compromise, which reflects how deeply these social distinctions ran, even in works seeking to question them. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:` [[Books index]]