ABSTRACT
The first version of Pride and Prejudice, then called First Impressions, was written between October 1796 and August 1797. On 1 November 1797 Jane Austen’s father, Rev. George Austen, wrote to the London publisher Cadell to ask if he would be interested in publishing this novel; the offer was declined by return of post. A novel by Margaret Holford entitled First Impressions was published in 1800, leading Jane Austen to change her title, the new one being possibly borrowed from Fanny Burney’s Cecilia. The text seems to have been revised at a later date (scholars disagree as to exactly when this was done), but the publication of Sense and Sensibility clearly helped matters, since on 29 November 1812 Jane Austen wrote to her friend Martha Lloyd that she had sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice to Thomas Egerton for £110 (she had wanted £150), and Egerton published it late in January 1813, the author receiving her first copy on 27 January (she wrote on 29 January ‘I have got my own darling child from London’). The first recorded advertisement was in The Morning Chronicle on 28 January 1813; the price of the three volumes was 18s. in paper boards (generally blue-grey paper boards, white paper spines, with white or pink paper spine labels). The size of the edition is not known, although a figure of 1500 copies has been suggested. No part of the original manuscript survives. Like Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice was published anonymously, but its authorship did not long remain a secret; Jane Austen’s letters record early praise from Lady Robert Kerr, Warren Hastings, and Dr Edmund Isham (Warden of All Souls College, Oxford) in September 1813.
