NOTE ON THE TEXT Pride and Prejudice was written (as First Impressions) between Octo- ber 1796 and August 1797, and offered by Jane Austen's father to the publisher Cadell on 1 November 1797 as 'a manuscript novel, com- prising 3 vols., about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina.... I shall be much obliged... if you will inform me whether you choose to be concerned in it, what will be the expense of publishing it at the author's risk, and what you will venture to advance for the property of it, if on perusal it is approved of.' Cadell was not interested; and the book, 'lop't and crop't' and otherwise revised, eventually went to Thomas Egerton of the Military Library in Whitehall for £110 ( Jane Austen had asked £150). The first printing of c. 1,500 copies (18s. in boards) in January 1813 sold out, and a second edition--without apparent revision by the author--appeared in November. The third edition was published by John Murray in 1817, and also has no authority (although it became the basis of many nineteenth-century reprints). The present text is substantially that of R. W. Chapman's edition ( Oxford, 1923; revised by Mary Lascelles, 1965), based on the first edition collated with the second and third. Chapman's textual apparatus has been revised and his emendations reconsidered. J.K. -xxvii- |