Essay | Pride and Prejudice: Mr. Collins' Proposals

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is a novel about marriage and the different attitudes people had towards it, the social conventions of the time, and the role of women in society. Austen wrote pride and prejudice in the late 18th century. In this time, it seems that the whole purpose of a lady's childhood and teenage years, were to prepare her for marriage, and make her into a suitable candidate to compete in the race for a husband. Austen portrays this bizarreness in her novel, and I plan to analyse two proposals made to Elizabeth Bennett, and expose the truths Austen was trying to portray throughout her whole novel. Elizabeth Bennett is an engaging, lively, twenty year old with a "playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous" she also takes immense pride in her perceptiveness. Mr Collins is a cousin of the Bennett family, at barely twenty-five years of...
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