Who wrote Pride and Prejudice?

Jane Austen, published in 1813 - anonymously, as By the Author of Sense and Sensibility. None of her novels carried her name in her lifetime; her authorship was an open secret in literary circles and unknown to the general public, and her brother only put her name to the last two after she died.

She had written a version of it, called First Impressions, seventeen years earlier when she was about twenty. Her father offered it to a publisher, who declined it unseen. She revised it heavily over the following decade and a half, which is a useful corrective to the idea of her as a naive genius - the sentence everyone can quote was worked on for a very long time.

The economics are the part modern readers most often miss. The novel opens on a joke about a single man in possession of a good fortune, and behind it is the entailment: the Bennet estate passes to a male relative, so five daughters whose father dies are destitute unless they marry. Austen never married, earned perhaps 600 pounds from her writing across her life, and died at 41 - and the reason her heroines' marriages read as victories rather than romances is that she was describing the only career available.