Jane Austen is one of the most prominent women novelists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Out of all her novels, Pride and Prejudice is by far most popular as well as the most critically acclaimed novel. This novel deals with the politics of love and marriage observed in the transition period when the Augustan phase ended and the Victorian Era began. Though, Austen lived during some ground-shaking historic events like the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; she doesn't mention either of the historic events in her various novels. Her speciality has to do more with portraying the day to day livelihood of the 'genteel' class during the Victorian period- along with the idiosyncrasy, vulgarity, and hypocrisy that prevailed amongst the people. Austen doesn't bombard the reader with faults of the English gentry; but rather she embedded in her characters the virtues and the imperfections that reigned over them- as to give the reader a clear and comprehensible picture of what Austen actually wants to say. .
Austen's display of the society is confined to the portrayal of the gentry class in which she was born and bought up. Leonie Villard rightly says: ""The 'gentry', the class which is essentially proper to the English society, holding to the aristocracy as well as to the middle class, and forming a link between them, is not the only class which Jane Austen knows the best, it is also the only class that she wishes to know." .
One of the basic issues that the novel Pride and Prejudice revolves around is marriage. The significance and understanding of marriage was quite different in the late 18th century (the time around which Austen wrote First Impressions, the original title intended for Pride and Prejudice, although it was published in the early 19th century). Marriage was a tool for a young girl to gain social security and position in the society. It was a compulsion; otherwise the young lady, if she exceeds a certain 'marriageable age', would be termed as a spinster and the society would not give them as much acceptance and respect as they would to a 'married' woman.
