All Things Pride and Prejudice

The opening of Pride and Prejudice can be called the most famous first sentence in English-language fiction.
Each of Jane Austen’s other novels begins by introducing one of its principal characters. Only Pride and Prejudice begins with an aphorism: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” An aphorism, or rather a mock aphorism, for it is immediately intimated that this “truth universally acknowledged” is in fact nothing more than one of the fixed opinions of the “neighborhood” of “surrounding families” amidst which the novel’s action is to take place. The introduction of individual characters is delayed until the third paragraph (even then withholding the usual Austenian fanfare of station, condition, and history), and the community turns out to be the novel’s true point of departure. Indeed, the note on which this opening ends, that our bachelor of property will himself become the property of “some one or other” of the local young ladies, lends, if only for a moment, a teasingly arbitrary air to the identity of the specific family the narrator finally does introduce. In other words, Pride and Prejudice can also be seen as beginning with the introduction of one of its principal figures, only here that figure is a community.
One might think this a strange choice given the protagonist with whom we are to be concerned; of all of Austen’s heroines, surely the brilliant, exuberant Elizabeth Bennett deserves star billing. But as one tends to forget in retrospect—so thoroughly does her presence dominate the novel as a whole,so large does her energy and brilliance bulk in one’s imagination—Elizabeth is very far from being the center of attention in the early chapters, scarcely mentioned at all until the third, not clearly emerging as the heroine until the sixth. What is presented in these first scenes is more than anything the story of a community: of communal expectations, communal conventions, communal activities. These pressures drive Mrs. Bennet, and consequently the rest of her family, into the actions that occupy the novel’s first chapters.
And in the most important of the early episodes, the assembly at which Mr. Bingley and his friends make their debut in the neighborhood of Meryton gentry, the community itself steps forward, through a kind of disembodied collective consciousness, to engage in acts of observation and judgment that set the course of the rest of the narrative. Elizabeth cannot appear until well into this initial story because it is that story—the story of how a community thinks, talks, exerts influence—that produces her plot, that produces her.
These considerations suggest a relationship between Elizabeth and her community very different from that generally depicted in the critical literature. A host of readers have emphasized her individuality and imaginative freedom, but in crucial ways she is not free and very little of an individualist, ways in which her story must be seen, not as an exercise of freedom, but as an effort to achieve freedom, not as a light-footed dance away from a community that cannot contain her, but as a struggle to wake herself out of a community in which she is all too comfortably embedded. From this point of view, Pride and Prejudice can be seen as Austen’s most deliberate and sustained critique of community—a constructive critique, since the novel ends by sketching an alternative vision of communal life that corrects what has been shown to be vicious and preserves what has been shown to cherishable in it. To trace these processes through the narrative we should take Austen’s hint and look at the community first, Elizabeth’s place within it only afterwards.