Pride and Prejudice, chapters 1-5

Jane Austen's second published novel is one of the best known and best loved in the English language, so much so that it's almost impossible to see it clearly any longer; it's become a set of fixed images and responses in our collective mind. Perhaps only Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" has undergone so thorough a metamorphosis from literary work to cultural bulwark, bogged down by the accumulated accretions of generations who know it only second- or third-hand—or who know it only by...