A rich single man takes a house in the neighbourhood and five unmarried sisters become, overnight, a family with a strategy. That is the whole engine of the book, and Austen runs it through drawing rooms, letters, walks in the rain and conversations where nobody says the thing they mean.
Elizabeth Bennet is the reason it lasts. She is quick, she is proud of being quick, and being quick is exactly what gets her wrong about the two men who matter. Darcy insults her within ten minutes of meeting her and spends the rest of the novel finding out what that cost him. Wickham is charming, which in this book is a warning. Mr. Collins is the funniest character in English fiction who does not know he is in a comedy.
The plot is a courtship. The subject is not. Austen published it in 1813, in three volumes, and it was written by a woman with no money of her own about the one decision a woman with no money of her own was permitted to make. Class, property, reputation, and how little of any of it a clever person controls.
This edition sets all sixty one chapters entire, with the three volume division of the first edition restored, so the book breaks where Austen broke it: volume two opens on Miss Bingley’s letter, volume three on the road into Pemberley. Nothing is abridged and nothing is modernised.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 366 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Complete and unabridged.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
