SOURCE: Seeber, Barbara K. “We Must Forget It: The Unhappy Truth in Pride and Prejudice.” In General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism, pp. 85-92. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, which applies Mikhail Bakhtin's linguistic theory of dialogism to Austen's works, Seeber concludes that Pride and Prejudice remains “haunted” by the narrative of Wickham and Georgiana despite the main narrative's repression of this material.

Pride and Prejudice, Austen's “own darling Child” (Austen 1995, 201), is often considered the quintessential Austen novel, certainly the most widely read and most widely taught in schools and at the undergraduate level. As Marilyn Butler points out, “the general public has liked Pride and Prejudice the best of all Jane Austen's novels, and it is easy to see why” (1987, 217). Susan Morgan agrees that the novel “has a charmed place as the most popular of Austen's novels” (1980, 78). In criticism, too, the...