Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Dialogue with Germaine de Staël’s Corinne

This essay argues that Pride and Prejudice reflects Austen’s serious engagement with characters and themes in Germain de Staël’s popular novel Corinne, or Italy (1807). The heroine and hero of Pride and Prejudice share numerous personality traits with those in Corinne, and both couples also experience the same central conflict stemming from the hero’s and his family’s prejudice against those from a different social or ethnic group. Just as significant as the similarities, however, are the differences between Staël’s and Austen’s texts, reflecting the ways in which Austen defined her own outlook and literary technique in dialogic exchange with other writers. This essay demonstrates that, far from being a throw-back to the eighteenth century as she has traditionally been viewed, Austen was well-read in the latest works of fiction and embedded her reactions to them in her compositions.