SOURCE: Kelly, Gary. “The Art of Reading in Pride and Prejudice.” English Studies in Canada 10, no. 2 (June 1984): 156-71.

In the following essay, Kelly explores the role of reading in Pride and Prejudice, drawing a parallel between Elizabeth's inclination to read her world like a book and the reader's epistemological approach to the novel.

It is by now well established that Pride and Prejudice is about perception and judgement as acts of the whole mind, with important ethical consequences in domestic and social life.¹ The story deals with characters who are, in varying degrees, good or bad observers and judges of themselves and the world around them, and the plot shows how some of these characters, and especially the heroine, can learn to be better observers and judges by learning to avoid the enemies of good judgement, namely prejudice, ignorance, and habit or convention. Luckily (for this is a...