Fiction Writing Lessons from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

From crafting fantastic villains to incorporating silence as dialogue, Jane Austen was master of many a literary device. Her Pride and Prejudice is so belovedly well-written that in the more than 200 years since its initial publication, the novel has never once gone out of print. Austen wasn’t just a writer, she was a reader — admiring words by everyone from Walter Scott to Anne Radcliffe.

She also understood the importance of reading with a writer’s eye. As writers, we must do more than understand what literary devices like characterization and foreshadowing mean. We must to recognize them when we read, then instinctively apply the techniques to our own fiction work.

The latter is the hard part, but good news is there’s a fix: Read like a writer. “This means you don’t read just to find out what happens next in the story,” says Gabriela Pereira, author of writing craft book DIY MFA, “You read in order to figure out what the writer is doing and how she achieves a particular effect so that you can recreate something similar in your own writing.”

To help you do that, here’s a look at what Jane Austen does well in Pride and Prejudice according to Lizzy Sisk, series editor at Writing Through the Classics. Writing Through the Classics publishes classic novels alongside notes for writers. The notes point out the fiction techniques used and provide prompts and exercises to help writers use the same strategies in their own work.

(Stop reading here if you’re yet to read P+P. Spoilers ahead.)

WRITING A “GOOD” VILLAIN

How Austen Gets It Right:

George Wickham may be the quintessential bad boy, but unless you’ve read the novel before, you wouldn’t know it. He’s debonaire enough to trick even the discerning Elizabeth Bennet into thinking he’s a good person. “Truth is the man’s a blatant liar who runs off with the most vulnerable Bennet daughter,” says Sisk, “yet the whole darn family thinks he’s swell.”