Pride and Prejudice

Movies and other adaptations
Pride and Prejudice inspired various stage, film, and television productions. Notable adaptations included the 1940 film with Greer Garson as Elizabeth and Laurence Olivier as Darcy, the 1995 TV miniseries starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and the 2005 movie featuring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. The novel also served as a premise for a myriad of books at the turn of the 21st century, including the best seller Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding (which was followed by a number of sequels and adapted into a popular movie series [2001–16] starring Renée Zellweger, Firth, and Hugh Grant). Other such books included Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith (also adapted into a movie [2016]) and Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged (2015) by Ayisha Malik, in which a 21st-century Muslim woman is intrigued by her sullen tattooed neighbour. These interpretations showed the universal and enduring appeal of Pride and Prejudice and its themes.
Bennet family, fictional characters in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813). Mr. Bennet is an intelligent but eccentric and sarcastic man who is fond of his two oldest daughters—especially his favourite, Elizabeth—but scorns the rest of the family. He does not care for society’s conventions and mocks his wife’s obsession with finding suitable husbands for their daughters. Mrs. Bennet is a woman of little sense and much self-pity. The oldest daughter, Jane, is sweet-tempered and modest and is her sister Elizabeth’s confidant and friend. Elizabeth, the heroine of the novel, is intelligent and high-spirited. She shares her father’s distaste for the conventional views of society as to the importance of wealth and rank. She is therefore initially prejudiced against the aristocratic hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy, because of what she sees as his excessive pride amounting to arrogance. She revises her opinion of him but retains her disdain for those who use their position in society to intimidate others. The third daughter, Mary, is plain, bookish, and pompous. Lydia and Kitty, the two youngest, are flighty and immature girls.
Fitzwilliam Darcy, fictional character, the suitor of Elizabeth Bennet in the novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen. At first Elizabeth spurns him because of his extreme pride, but when Darcy and Elizabeth come to know one another, his true character is revealed.