ABSTRACT

Jane Austen was one of fiction’s most important innovators. All six of her published novels treat the emotion of love. In Pride and Prejudice, she transformed the Western idea in which a person might see someone across a crowded room, meet that person’s eyes, and fall in love. At the beginning of this novel, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy do see each other, but are disdainful—both rather proud, both rather prejudiced. Not only does Austen suggest that one can only really love a person when one comes to know them, but as Elizabeth and Darcy start to know each other and, because of this, can begin to love each other, she arranges that we, as readers, come to know and love these two characters as well. Thereby she creates a parallel in which we readers can come to feel with these protagonists, empathetically. After Pride and Prejudice, the novel Emma is briefly discussed, as part of Austen’s exploration of the psychology of love relationships.