Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

Illustrated by Anna and Elena Balbusso

Introduced by Sebastian Faulks

Both a sparkling comedy of manners and a gripping romance, Pride and Prejudice remains one of the best-loved books in the world.

I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry

One of the world’s favourite books, Pride and Prejudice has long been regarded as a classic romance. In Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, Jane Austen created the greatest pair of sparring lovers since Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick. This sparkling comedy of manners features an inimitable cast of characters including the obsequious Mr Collins, the autocratic Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs Bennet, the most embarrassing mother in literature.

Awarded the Distinguished Merit by the International Jury of the 3x3 International ProShow No.11 Awards 2014.

PRODUCTION DETAILS

Bound in blocked metallic cloth

Set in Baskerville

352 pages

Frontispiece and 7 colour illustrations

Blocked slipcase

9½˝ x 6¼˝

‘A NOVEL OF ALMOST BOUNDLESS WIT AND CHARM’

‘The book has the freshness of a summer stream running to its inevitable happy conclusion.’

P. D. James

The award-winning Balbusso twins have contributed 8 exquisite illustrations to this edition, as well as a striking cover design. The novel’s celebrated first line is blocked in gold on the slipcase. In a new introduction, the author Sebastian Faulks praises ’a novel of almost boundless wit and charm that has withstood film and television adaptations and attempts to define it as a ”fairy tale” or a ”rom-com”.’

ABOUT JANE AUSTEN

Jane Austen was born in Hampshire in 1775, the seventh child and youngest daughter of George Austen, rector of Deane and Steventon, and his wife, Cassandra. She began writing poems, plays and stories for her family from a young age, and her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, was released by Thomas Egerton to sell-out acclaim in 1811. Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815) followed, and these were the last of Austen’s works to come out in her lifetime. Her novels, including the posthumously published Northanger Abbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818), are today considered amongst the finest in the English language. She died at Winchester in 1817.

ABOUT ANNA AND ELENA BALBUSSO

Anna and Elena Balbusso are an internationally recognised team of Italian artists. Together they have received more than 70 international awards, including the New York Society of Illustrators’ Steven Dohanos Award and the Los Angeles Society of Illustrators’ Joseph Morgan Henninger Award. For three consecutive years (2011–13) they were awarded the Gold Medal in the book category of the Society of Illustrators Awards: in 2012 for their work on the Folio Society edition of The Handmaid’s Tale. In 2013 they won the Book Illustration category at the V&A Illustration Awards for their work on the Folio edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (2012). They have also illustrated The Song of Roland (2010), First Love (2010), Pride and Prejudice (2013), The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (2014), Twelfth Night (2016) and Atlas Shrugged (2018) for The Folio Society. 

ABOUT SEBASTIAN FAULKS

Sebastian Faulks’ books include Birdsong (1993; The Folio Society, 2008), Charlotte Gray (1998), On Green Dolphin Street (2001), Human Traces (2005), A Week in December (2009) and A Possible Life (2012). In 2011 he wrote and presented the four-part television series Faulks on Fiction for BBC2. He is an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.