Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen`s witty comedy of manners — one of the popular novels of all time — that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the "most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author`s works," and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as "irresistible and as nearly fl awless as any fi ction could be."