ABSTRACT
Jane Austen’s original title for her first novel was First Impressions; these seem to be about the only ones commonly exchanged between the military and their partners-to-be. In his 1972 introduction to the Penguin Classic Edition of Pride and Prejudice, Toby Tanner suggested that the principals might themselves have entitled a fiction about them Dignity and Perception. He goes on to suggest that:
the book is, most importantly, about pre-judging and re-judging. It is a drama of recognition – re-cognition, that act by which the mind can look again at a thing and if necessary make revisions and amendments until it sees the thing as it really is.1
