SOURCE: Schneider, Matthew. “Card-playing and the Marriage Gamble in Pride and Prejudice.” Dalhousie Review 73, no. 1 (spring 1993): 5-17.

In the following essay, Schneider argues that card-playing serves as an apt metaphor for the courtship ritual in Pride and Prejudice.

Henry Austen's casual observation that his novelist sister “was fond of dancing, and excelled in it” (Pride and Prejudice 308) has in recent years been invested by critics with a far-reaching metaphoric significance. Dancing, the argument goes, both figures the particular charm of Austen's style and provides an elegant symbolic matrix for much of the social interaction around which the novels are structured. A love of dancing was “the sort of thing one might expect,” writes Stuart Tave, “that enjoyment and ability in moving with significant grace in good time in a restricted space” (1); and Langdon Elsbree observes that dancing provides a primary source for “action and speech in Jane Austen's...