The Journal
What to read after Pride and Prejudice
If you have just finished Pride and Prejudice and want more of the same pleasures -- the wit, the social observation, the romantic comedy of manners -- there are several directions you can go, and the best next read depends on which part of Austen's novel you loved most.
Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813. It has never been out of print. If you finished it wanting more Austen, more of the same period, or something that extends the novel's concerns in new directions, here are the recommendations that most consistently satisfy readers who felt exactly what you felt.
If you want more Jane Austen#
Emma is the place to go. Many Austen scholars consider it her finest novel. It is funnier than Pride and Prejudice, its central character is more complex and more fallible, and its plot is more intricately constructed. Emma Woodhouse is one of the great characters in English fiction: intelligent, well-meaning, and spectacularly wrong about almost everything. Free on Foxing.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, written when she knew she was dying, and it shows. It is quieter, more autumnal, and more emotionally direct than her other books. Anne Elliot's story -- a woman who made the safe choice years ago and is living with the consequences -- is the most affecting thing Austen wrote. Free on Foxing.
Sense and Sensibility was Austen's first published novel and it shows the same concerns as Pride and Prejudice -- the economic vulnerability of women, the performance of social feeling -- but in a slightly more schematic form. The contrast between Elinor and Marianne is the argument made visible. Free on Foxing.
If you want the same period but a different sensibility#
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre was published in 1847 and is the closest thing the Victorian era produced to an Austen heroine transplanted into Gothic territory. Jane is poor, plain, and governess to a brooding employer with a secret. It is passionate where Austen is witty and direct where Austen is ironic. Many readers who love Pride and Prejudice find Jane Eyre even more satisfying.
Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) takes Austen's template -- a proud, intelligent woman, a difficult man, a gradual mutual recognition -- and transposes it into the industrial north of England. Margaret Hale and John Thornton have one of the great hostile-then-romantic dynamics in Victorian fiction. The novel also takes the class tensions that Austen handles ironically and makes them industrial and explicit.
If you want the wit and social comedy without the romance#
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is the purest comic argument that language is a social performance, which is also one of Austen's deepest subjects. The characters talk about nothing but what matters, indirectly, through the conventions of form. The Importance of Being Earnest is free on Foxing.
Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) has Austen's social observation applied to the politics of a cathedral close. The Reverend Obadiah Slope is one of fiction's great comic villains. Trollope's tone is Austen's tone applied to a larger canvas.
If you want modern fiction in the same vein#
Priya Parmar's Vanessa and Virginia and Joanna Trollope's adaptations of the Austen novels are the obvious contemporary recommendations. More adventurously: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day applies Austen's interest in repression and social performance to a very different setting -- a butler reflecting on a life of perfect professional restraint -- and reaches some of the same conclusions through very different means.
Further reading#
For all of Austen's novels ranked and assessed, the best Jane Austen novels ranked covers the full range with specific recommendations for different reading moods.
For the life of Austen and what drove her fiction, who Jane Austen was and why people still read her is the essential biographical companion.
For other books that deal with the economic vulnerability and social performance of women in the 19th century, five books that will change how you think about morality includes several that extend this theme.