A Scholarly Response to Richard Sampson's Review of Pride and Prejudice

Richard Sampson's review, "The Critical Faculty of Jane Austen," offers great insights, or at least speculations, into the inner workings of Jane Austen. As he suggests, Pride and Prejudice is founded upon a ironic, almost paradoxical structure. As he states, even though Austen's plots "presuppose an organized society of families," it is evident even as early as the 1st chapter (during which Mr. Bennet perturbs Mrs. Bennet with his superior wit and sarcasm) that the concept of marriage is fundamentally flawed. In his opinion, Austen develops a society in which the prominence and reputation of various families nearly overshadows the fact that the marriages within them are not based upon true love. Sampson associates Austen's ability to write so easily about love's hardships with her own personal life, stating that "she was contented with her home, with her brothers and sister, and did not want a husband." The marriages in the novel are not based upon true love; however, that these families have been around for so long attests to the importance of marriage in society and the familial reputation that is lost when individual members of a given family are not able to marry themselves.