SOURCE: Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “The Plot of Pride and Prejudice.” In The Errand of Form: An Assay of Jane Austen's Art, pp. 60-85. New York: Fordham University Press, 1967.

In the following essay, Wiesenfarth defends the aesthetic greatness of Pride and Prejudice, arguing that its plot is a sophisticated method of erecting an ideal value system.

Pride and Prejudice has long been considered a classic by the general reader,¹ but it no longer enjoys that distinction with many professional critics. To the latter, in the post-James and anti-plot era,² it seems too elegantly dressed in a strait jacket of form. “Exactness of symmetry,” writes Mary Lascelles, “… carries with it one danger. The novelist's subtlety of apprehension may be numbed by this other faculty of his for imposing order on what he apprehends.”³ The question, of course, is whether this is truly the case with Pride and Prejudice. Has the form...