Vol I · Ch 1
Chapter 1
Netherfield Park is let, Mrs. Bennet is in motion, and Austen's irony arrives fully formed in the famous opening sentence.
Pride and Prejudice — chapter by chapter
All 61 chapters, by volume and beat — from the famous opening sentence to the final trip to Pemberley.
Pride and Prejudice was published in three volumes and is still organized by them. Volume 1 (Chapters 1–23) establishes the world and ends with the Collins proposal and Elizabeth's refusal. Volume 2 (Chapters 24–42) takes Elizabeth to Hunsford and Rosings, brings Darcy's catastrophic first proposal in Chapter 34, and his letter the next morning — the hinge of the whole novel. Volume 3 (Chapters 43–61) begins at Pemberley and ends with two weddings in the same week.
Volume I · First impressions
Netherfield, the Bennets, and the first wrong readings.
Vol I · Ch 2
Chapter 2
Mr. Bennet's long-maintained pretence collapses: he has already called on Bingley, and the family's relief is complete.
Vol I · Ch 3
Chapter 3
At the Meryton assembly, Bingley charms the room and Darcy dismisses Elizabeth in an overheard aside she will not forget.
Vol I · Ch 4
Chapter 4
After the ball, Jane reports her admiration for Bingley with careful precision; Elizabeth teases her; the two contrasts — Bingley and Darcy, Jane and Elizabeth — are drawn.
Vol I · Ch 5
Chapter 5
Charlotte Lucas argues that Jane must show more affection to secure Bingley; Elizabeth disagrees, and the distance between the two friends' philosophies of marriage opens for the first time.
Vol I · Ch 6
Chapter 6
Darcy begins to notice Elizabeth's eyes and her intelligence; he tells himself he is cataloguing her faults and is not entirely convincing.
Vol I · Ch 7
Chapter 7
The entail is explained, the militia enchants Lydia and Kitty, and Mrs. Bennet's stratagem sends Jane to Netherfield on horseback in the rain — where Jane promptly falls ill.
Vol I · Ch 8
Chapter 8
Stranded at Netherfield, Elizabeth is picked apart by Miss Bingley; Darcy's defence of her is lukewarm in the right way.
Vol I · Ch 9
Chapter 9
Mrs. Bennet arrives at Netherfield to extend Jane's visit, talks freely about the entail and the militia, and leaves Elizabeth mortified in front of Darcy.
Vol I · Ch 10
Chapter 10
An evening of needlework and letters; Darcy and Elizabeth debate pride and vanity while Miss Bingley tries unsuccessfully to insert herself.
Vol I · Ch 11
Chapter 11
Jane joins the drawing room; Miss Bingley attempts Darcy's attention all evening; Darcy and Elizabeth discuss vanity with enough charge that Miss Bingley proposes they go to bed.
Vol I · Ch 12
Chapter 12
Elizabeth secures the carriage and leaves Netherfield; Darcy, resolved to show nothing, speaks barely ten words to her and congratulates himself on the danger averted.
Vol I · Ch 13
Chapter 13
Mr. Collins's letter, read aloud at breakfast, announces his imminent arrival and introduces himself through prose of extraordinary self-congratulation.
Vol I · Ch 14
Chapter 14
Mr. Collins praises Lady Catherine de Bourgh across the dinner table with an enthusiasm that reveals more about Collins than about Lady Catherine.
Vol I · Ch 15
Chapter 15
Collins's character is sketched — pompous, vain, thoroughly pleased with himself — and on the walk to Meryton, Wickham appears for the first time.
Vol I · Ch 16
Chapter 16
Wickham's account of Darcy's cruelty — the stolen living, the broken promise — lands on soil that has been prepared by Elizabeth's existing dislike, and she believes every word.
Vol I · Ch 17
Chapter 17
Jane hears Wickham's story and resolves that both men have been misled; Elizabeth teases her; both are looking forward to the Netherfield ball.
Vol I · Ch 18
Chapter 18
The Netherfield ball: Wickham is missing, Mr. Collins dances badly, Darcy and Elizabeth spar across the floor, and the evening ends in collective embarrassment.
Vol I · Ch 19
Chapter 19
Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth with exhausting formality and receives a firm refusal he interprets as bashful modesty — and will not update.
Vol I · Ch 20
Chapter 20
Mrs. Bennet appeals to Mr. Bennet; he rules against her with devastating brevity; Collins redirects his attentions to Charlotte Lucas.
Vol I · Ch 21
Chapter 21
Collins attaches himself to Charlotte; Wickham explains his absence; Jane receives Miss Bingley's letter announcing the party's permanent departure from Netherfield.
Vol I · Ch 22
Chapter 22
Charlotte Lucas, twenty-seven and pragmatic about her limited options, orchestrates and accepts Mr. Collins's proposal — achieving her goal of a secure home with full knowledge of its cost.
Vol I · Ch 23
Chapter 23
The Collins-Lucas engagement goes public, and Mrs. Bennet's reception of it — as personal injury, conspiracy, and injustice — establishes Austen's sharpest comic note for the early volume.
Volume II · The letter
Hunsford, Rosings, the first proposal, and Darcy's letter.
Vol II · Ch 1
Chapter 24
Miss Bingley's letter closes the door on Jane's hopes, and Elizabeth, watching her sister absorb the news, shifts from grief to anger at Bingley's weakness and his friends' interference.
Vol II · Ch 2
Chapter 25
Mr. Collins departs for Kent and the Gardiners arrive for Christmas; Mrs. Gardiner's careful concern about Wickham introduces the chapter's note of rational counsel against an attraction Elizabeth cannot quite disown.
Vol II · Ch 3
Chapter 26
Mrs. Gardiner warns Elizabeth plainly about Wickham, and Wickham promptly pivots to a girl with ten thousand pounds — leaving Elizabeth to defend both his character and her own judgment against evidence that sits uncomfortably.
Vol II · Ch 4
Chapter 27
Elizabeth departs for Hunsford with the dull company of Sir William and Maria Lucas, stops in London to see Jane and the Gardiners, and arrives at the Collinses' parsonage to find Charlotte cheerfully in command of a household her husband doesn't quite notice.
Vol II · Ch 5
Chapter 28
Elizabeth arrives at Hunsford and takes the measure of Charlotte's domestic management with admiration — the house is Charlotte's, the garden Collins's, and the arrangement works by a system of calculated geography.
Vol II · Ch 6
Chapter 29
The visit to Rosings delivers Lady Catherine in her setting: authoritative, interrogating, certain of her own superiority, and genuinely surprised to find Elizabeth Bennet unwilling to be impressed.
Vol II · Ch 7
Chapter 30
Sir William departs for home and the parsonage finds its rhythm: Collins in his garden or his study, Charlotte managing quietly from the back of the house, and Elizabeth beginning to understand the ingenuity of the whole arrangement.
Vol II · Ch 8
Chapter 31
Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam arrive at Rosings, and Fitzwilliam's attentive conversation with Elizabeth at the evening party draws both Darcy's repeated sidelong glances and Lady Catherine's thunderous interruption.
Vol II · Ch 9
Chapter 32
Darcy calls at the parsonage and finds Elizabeth alone — a visit of awkward silences and stilted questions about Netherfield that Charlotte, watching from a distance, begins to read as something more.
Vol II · Ch 10
Chapter 33
Darcy appears three separate times in Elizabeth's private grove, and then Colonel Fitzwilliam, walking with her, reveals that Darcy has recently congratulated himself on separating a friend from a most imprudent match — clearly Jane and Bingley.
Vol II · Ch 11
Chapter 34
Darcy proposes to Elizabeth at the parsonage — opening with the obstacles of her inferiority and his reluctance, expecting acceptance, receiving refusal — and the chapter ends on Elizabeth's accusation that he separated Jane from Bingley.
Vol II · Ch 12
Chapter 35
Darcy hands Elizabeth a letter in the grove — two sheets written all the way through — containing his account of Wickham's history with the Darcy family and his own account of separating Bingley from Jane.
Vol II · Ch 13
Chapter 36
Elizabeth rereads Darcy's letter a second and third time, forces herself to examine every sentence about Wickham, and arrives at the uncomfortable recognition that her own vanity — her confidence in her first impressions — had made her exactly the fool she least wanted to be.
Vol II · Ch 14
Chapter 37
Darcy and Fitzwilliam leave Rosings; Lady Catherine invites the parsonage party to dinner out of boredom and remarks that Miss Bennet looks out of spirits, attributing it without hesitation to reluctance to leave Kent.
Vol II · Ch 15
Chapter 38
Mr. Collins delivers a farewell address that manages to thank Elizabeth while enumerating every distinction of his own position, and Charlotte walks to the gate for a quiet goodbye that says what Collins's speeches cannot.
Vol II · Ch 16
Chapter 39
Kitty and Lydia intercept the returning sisters at the inn with cold meat, a bonnet Lydia plans to take apart, and enthusiastic promotion of a summer trip to Brighton to follow the militia regiment.
Vol II · Ch 17
Chapter 40
Elizabeth tells Jane about the proposal and the letter, and the two sisters work through what Wickham is and what, if anything, they can say about him — arriving at the conclusion that silence is what Darcy's account, and Georgiana's situation, requires.
Vol II · Ch 18
Chapter 41
Lydia is invited to Brighton by Mrs. Forster and Mr. Bennet refuses to stop her, despite Elizabeth's explicit warning — and Wickham says a warm farewell to Elizabeth that she can now read more accurately than when such attentions first drew her in.
Vol II · Ch 19
Chapter 42
Elizabeth counts the cost of her father's wasted intelligence and braces for Lydia's summer in Brighton with the militia — a combination she already fears.
Volume III · Pemberley
Derbyshire, the Lydia crisis, and the second proposal.
Vol III · Ch 1
Chapter 43
Elizabeth tours Pemberley, and the house, the grounds, and the housekeeper's testimony begin to dismantle every assumption she formed about Darcy at Meryton.
Vol III · Ch 2
Chapter 44
Darcy arrives the next morning with his sister Georgiana — and Elizabeth discovers that Meryton's 'proud Miss Darcy' is, in fact, merely very shy.
Vol III · Ch 3
Chapter 45
Tea at Pemberley ends with Miss Bingley trying to deprecate Elizabeth in Darcy's hearing — and receiving the quietest, most devastating correction of the novel.
Vol III · Ch 4
Chapter 46
Two letters from Jane bring the Lydia-Wickham elopement news crashing into Elizabeth's Derbyshire holiday — and Darcy walks in to find her in pieces.
Vol III · Ch 5
Chapter 47
The carriage rides south with the Gardiners reasoning toward hope — and Elizabeth reasoning toward the opposite, knowing what she cannot yet say about Wickham.
Vol III · Ch 6
Chapter 48
The household waits in silence for news from London, while all of Meryton performs an about-face on Wickham's character it had championed six months earlier.
Vol III · Ch 7
Chapter 49
An express from Mr. Gardiner ends the waiting: Lydia and Wickham are found, and a marriage has been arranged — though Mr. Bennet suspects the terms are suspiciously cheap.
Vol III · Ch 8
Chapter 50
Mr. Bennet reads the financial terms of Lydia's settlement and recognizes that his brother-in-law has paid something he cannot afford — though he does not yet know the true source.
Vol III · Ch 9
Chapter 51
Lydia returns as Mrs. Wickham, as loud and triumphant as if the elopement had been a victory — and Wickham smiles through the visit with his usual effortless nerve.
Vol III · Ch 10
Chapter 52
Mrs. Gardiner's long letter reveals the truth: it was Darcy who found Lydia and Wickham, Darcy who paid Wickham's debts, and Darcy who insisted on taking no credit.
Vol III · Ch 11
Chapter 53
The Wickhams depart for Newcastle, and before Lydia's carriage is out of sight Mrs. Bennet has shifted her matrimonial attention to the news that Bingley is returning.
Vol III · Ch 12
Chapter 54
Bingley calls and brings Darcy — who is warm with everyone except Elizabeth, toward whom he is so carefully distant that she cannot decide whether he still cares.
Vol III · Ch 13
Chapter 55
Bingley returns early one morning, and after three hours alone with Jane in the sitting room comes out with an engagement — and Mrs. Bennet gets the moment she has been building toward since Chapter 1.
Vol III · Ch 14
Chapter 56
Lady Catherine de Bourgh arrives at Longbourn to forbid a match she has only heard rumored — and Elizabeth refuses, calmly and completely, to say anything of the kind she demands.
Vol III · Ch 15
Chapter 57
Elizabeth lies awake calculating the odds that Lady Catherine will succeed in persuading Darcy — and then her father reads a letter from Mr. Collins aloud, to great hilarity that Elizabeth can barely share.
Vol III · Ch 16
Chapter 58
Elizabeth and Darcy are left alone on a lane near Longbourn, and the conversation that follows — this time begun by her — undoes everything the first proposal left broken.
Vol III · Ch 17
Chapter 59
Elizabeth tells Jane of the engagement — Jane cannot believe it, then cries — and then goes to her father, who asks her once, seriously, if she is sure.
Vol III · Ch 18
Chapter 60
The engaged couple review the history — Elizabeth asks how he could have fallen for her impertinence, and Darcy says he was in the middle before he knew he had begun.
Vol III · Ch 19
Chapter 61
The final chapter accounts for every Bennet in two pages — and confirms that Mr. Bennet visited Pemberley on horseback so often it surprised everyone, including himself.