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Published in 1813, Pride and Prejudice is an internationally popular novel. In 1796, at the age of twenty-one, Austen started writing her first novel First Impressions with the support of her father and completed it the next year. Her father, George Austen, played an important role in her writing, without whose support and influence she might not be able to become an outstanding novelist. When Austen finished First Impressions, her father would like to be the first reader to appreciate her writing and he was deeply impressed by it. Therefore, her father sent the manuscript to London publisher hoping that he could have it published. Unfortunately, his effort was rejected. But later, after a thorough modification, a revised and renamed version was published as Pride and Prejudice in 1813. The novel is famous for its fresh writing style, fluent language, and keen observation and it has timeless charm beyond time and space.
Austen set the story in the first decade of the 19th century. On the one hand, the progress of the industrial revolution and the development of printing industry made it possible for novels to be produced in great numbers. On the other hand, with the rapid development of economy and fast accumulation of social wealth, the middle-class women had more free time to read novels, which promoted the awakening of female consciousness at that time. By the time of the Victorian era, the female education has received the unprecedented attention and made tremendous improvement. The heroine of Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth, an intelligent girl with a keen sense of observation who likes reading. As a consequence of wide reading, she is quite different from the so-called “elegant ladies” who are usually meek and undemonstrative. Instead, she is confident, independent and courageous. She dares to challenge the traditional ethics as she insists on her own principles and never compromises easily. And the changes of her attitude towards Darcy indicates women's pursuit of independence and equal rights. What is the most admirable is that she regards the sincere love and mutual respect between man and woman as the basis of a happy marriage and opposes to marriage only for money and status at a time when marriage is the only way for women to live a better life and obtain social recognition.
Actually, Elizabeth embodies Austen's concept of female salvation, i.e., education, mostly by means of reading and writing, is the only way for women to achieve their self-cultivation. Austen believes that education enables people to have a right understanding of themselves and then to surpass themselves. It can be seen that Austen attaches great importance to female education. As a female writer, she realizes the significance of reading for female education. In Pride and Prejudice, some different characters are created to demonstrate the educated women's intelligence and capacity, hinting at the gender equality in education.
1.2 Previous studies of Pride and Prejudice文献综述
With the publication of Pride and Prejudice in 1813, various studies have been made on Austen's works. As a female writer, Austen depicts the living conditions of women and her works embodied the pursuit of women. Therefore, many researches on her are conducted from feminism criticism, among which the most influential one is the study carried out by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979). In The Mad Women in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, they believe that no female are willing to submit to male and the purpose of female submission is to attain the limited power in that male-dominated society. In their study, they describe how Austen's novels dramatize “the necessity of female submission for female survival”. From this it can be seen that women are under the male oppression in many fields including economy, politics and education.
Another critic, David Monaghan (1981) studies Austen's works from a historical perspective focusing on women problems in Austen's times. He tries to explore the change of female status after the Industrial Revolution but is disappointed. Under the influence of patriarchy deep-rooted in British, women were still despised and regarded as vassals. Despite Monaghan's study has little directly to say about Pride and Prejudice, his influence is evident on many other critics on this novel thereafter.