Pride, Prejudice, and Prestige

Harvard's Belknap edition of Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Austen lived in a time when the meaning of books in society was changing. Advances in printing technology were making books more accessible than they had ever been before. Before this time, a book had been an expensive symbol of luxury and prestige: a personally bound item, lodged in a family library in an estate like Pemberley. Books served a dual purpose: to be read, but also to be seen. This is, of course, still true. We purchase books partly based on how they’ll look on our shelves and coffee tables. Certain editions of Pride and Prejudice work especially hard to confer prestige on their owners, and on Austen’s text.

Harvard’s Belknap edition conveys a sense of literary prestige with its Harvard name, and also with its format. Its large size alone declares significance. Its pages are thick and glossy. Its construction is clearly expensive. Its margins are huge, putting Austen’s words on a kind of pedestal of blankness. In some ways, this Belknap edition wants to be exactly like an “original” from 1813: it wants to be a handsome book ornamenting a gentleman’s library. Even its title page is formatted in a way that evokes the title pages of nineteenth-century novels. Through their staid covers and luxurious construction, these editions all try to cast Pride and Prejudice as a classic—a text of prestige.

This oversized, annotated edition conveys prestige with its large margins and thick, glossy paper.

Norton editions convey academic prestige with their sober formatting and the Norton name. A Norton on your shelf declares that you take Austen seriously as literature.

Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a crowd favorite Pride and Prejudice adaptation, plays with the aura of prestige created by something like a Penguin Classics book. It takes that prestige and redraws it—literally—into something new and surprising. Interestingly, Grahame-Smith does exactly the same thing with Austen’s text. He leaves her words intact. He cuts nothing, but adds enough text to re-set Austen’s story inside a zombie apocalypse.