Mrs. Bennet has five daughters and one consuming ambition: to see them all married before the money runs out. Her second daughter Elizabeth has other ideas. Sharp-tongued, clear-eyed, and constitutionally resistant to flattery, Elizabeth meets the wealthy and insufferable Mr. Darcy at a local ball and takes an immediate, well-reasoned dislike to him. He returns the sentiment. What follows is one of the most perfectly constructed comedies in the English language - a novel that is hilarious on the surface and quietly devastating underneath, about the limited options open to intelligent women in a world that measures them entirely by their marriageability. Austen never raises her voice. She doesn't need to. Every ironic sentence is a scalpel. Elizabeth Bennet remains one of fiction's great heroines not because she escapes her circumstances, but because she insists, against all odds, on her right to be known.