Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: Traditional Grand Denouement or Anticlimactic Ending?

Abstract

[eng] Criticism of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has repeatedly maintained that the author replicated a fixed storyline in each of her six canonical novels, in which the hero and heroine ultimately find happiness after a previous series of misunderstandings. Pride and Prejudice, however, exposes a peculiar structural pattern which is not further reproduced in any of her later novels. In Pride and Prejudice, the narrative tension reaches its peak with Mr. Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth Bennet and, as a result, the novel subsequently heads towards a happy yet anticlimactic ending. This paper will take as the departing point how the main characters are introduced to the reader and to each other with a view to determining the causes which are conducive to both the first proposal and the final resolution of the plot brought about by the second proposal.