SOURCE: Christie, William. “Pride, Politics, and Prejudice.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20, no. 3 (1997): 313-34.

In the following essay, Christie finds that in Pride and Prejudice, a novel deeply concerned with the pressing political issues of the day, Austen's compromise between conservatism and progressivism is ultimately a “collapse of the progressive position.”

Progressively more preoccupied with the individual sensibility and with the individual as a morally autonomous consciousness, the social phenomenon of the novel reflected that ultimately indefinable manifold of changes in the details and structures of scientific, philosophical, and psychological thinking that is “universally acknowledged” to have altered the personal and social construction of the Self in the eighteenth century. The changes themselves invariably led to the question of authority: of who should rule over, or overrule, whom; of what entitled or empowered someone—more ethically, what qualified someone—to rule at all.

Once upon a time the answers, certainly to...