Letters and Manipulation in Pride and Prejudice

To understand the importance of letters in Pride and Prejudice, a stage of the time period must first be set. In Regency Era England, there was no telephone line. Social media did not exist; the internet had not been conceptualized yet. Travel between closely-situated towns took hours, or even days. The conveyance of information between locations, no matter the distance, was lengthy at best. It is at this point where letters come into play. The sole means of (relatively) quick communication in the day, letters were used to convey everything from casual conversations and holiday greetings to battle plans. With the importance of letters established, it is much easier to appreciate the ways in which Jane Austen uses the writing, reading, and custom of letters to manipulate the readers’ opinion throughout the book.

The basis of much of Austen’s writing in general derives from her emotional manipulation of her readers. Whether from forcing our opinion through more obvious ridicule of English society to more subtly swinging our views of the main characters from one extreme to the other, she is in control for the entirety of the novel. The use of letters as strategic plot points throughout the novel allows her to hinge our opinions of characters on these letters. As characters write and receive letters, we see dramatic shifts in their perception of each other and society as a whole. Formal in expression but filled with underlying emotion, Austen uses letters to force the reader to accept new developments in the plot and read between the lines in a way that we otherwise could not. These letters are heavily laced with pre-formed opinions and references to past events, allowing Austen to sculpt own opinions to fir her own mold. Austen also utilizes the letters to make her overarching plot much more believable. Through the letters, we are handed opinions disguised as blatant fact, but with no real guarantee that they are true. She uses them to make...