Publication & Prejudice

When it comes to a beloved text like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), many of us have our own prejudices: What is a “classic” book, and what should it look like? Should it have an elegant cover with a white serif font and the image of an English estate in the background? Or should it be a coffee-table book, with wide margins and thick, luxurious pages? We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but the way a book looks tells us how to understand what we’re reading.

This sketch of Austen (ca. 1810) by her sister Cassandra is the only authenticated life portrait of her.

Pride and Prejudice exists in a plethora of forms: editions, covers, and even spinoffs. This exhibit brings together more than twenty versions of Pride and Prejudice from the Yale collections. Every one of these books tells more or less the same story. In each one there is a woman named Elizabeth Bennet, who meets a man named Fitzwilliam Darcy. In each one their relationship is complicated and delightful, and in each one the ending almost takes us by surprise.

But these stories also have differences. Even if they contain the same words, the size of the book, the paper, the typeface, and a hundred similar choices give us clues about what we’re reading, and how to read it.

The first thing we ask of any adaptation is whether it stays true to the original. But as one looks at versions of Pride and Prejudice, one becomes unsure of what the original text is—and whether it was ever fixed in the first place.