Abstract

In 1815, William Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review, wrote to John Murray, Jane Austen's publisher and the founder of the Quarterly, of his first encounter with Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813):

I have for the first time looked into Pride and Prejudice; and it is really a very pretty thing. No dark passages; no secret chambers; no wind-howlings in long galleries; no drops of blood upon a rusty dagger — things that should now be left to ladies' maids and sentimental washerwomen.