Pride and Prejudice

Description

"To create, a woman needs a room of her own" - Virginia Woolf

Jane Austen began writing a novel in October 1796, while staying in a room of her own at her brother's Edward house in Kent, she finished it in August 1797 and called it "First Impressions."

Between 1811 and 1812, Jane went back to work on "First Impressions" and made significant edits and revisions to the manuscript. When she finally became satisfied with her work she renamed the story "Pride and Prejudice."

Jane asked 150 for the novel's copyright but Thomas Egerton, the publisher consented to only 110.

Egerton published the first edition of Pride and Prejudice in three hardcover volumes on 27 January 1813 and priced the three volume set at 18 shillings (90 pence).

In October 2010, a set, in a relatively good condition, of Pride and Prejudice' first T. Egerton edition was sold for 140,000 at a Sotheby's auction in London, fetching more than 150,000 times its original price.

The romantic masterpiece is estimated to have sold more than 50 million copies, worldwide since it was first published and first T. Egerton editions, in a reasonably good condition, are regularly priced between 60,000 and 75,000 per copy.

To celebrate both women and fiction and the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice, Pygmaion editors decided to release this edition with an introduction by Virginia Woolf and a new Lizzy on the cover imagined by Gustav Klimt.