In the following excerpt, Kneedler explains how Pride and Prejudice breaks conventIOns in its portrayals of relationships between the sexes.

Students, like many critics, question the point of the last volume (the final 19 chapters) of Pride and Prejudice because they already know who will "get" whom. Many feminist scholars portray Austen's happy unions as either sexist, sellouts, or parodies. But Critics' declared dissatisfaction WIth marriage as a narrative resolution is never reconciled with unexamined prejudices against single women.             A number of critics themselves reiterate the tired news that Austen was a "spinster," a term that Austen's books never once invoke and that hardly defends singleness as a liberating option The twin assumptions that neither single nor married women can be powerful, useful, or happy leads to a deadlier myth. the curiously perverse axiom that suicide is...