Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Jane Austen, Elizabeth Klett · 1813 · 670 min

The most famous first sentence in English fiction is a joke at the reader's expense, and the book keeps that up for sixty-one chapters. Austen's plot is a marriage plot, but the engine is misjudgement — Elizabeth Bennet is wrong about Darcy, Darcy is wrong about everyone, and the narration is so close to Elizabeth's shoulder that you make her mistakes with her and feel the correction land. It is the romantic comedy every later one is measured against, and it is meaner and funnier than its adaptations let on: Mr Collins, Lady Catherine and Mrs Bennet are not softened for anyone.

Elizabeth Klett's solo reading is the one to have. Austen is all voice — the free indirect style that lets the narrator lean into a character's phrasing and then step back — and a single reader who can do that leaning is worth more than a cast. Eleven hours and ten minutes.

Chosen reading: LibriVox solo production (version 4), read by Elizabeth Klett; Internet Archive item prideandprejudice_1005_librivox — 61 files, one per chapter, contiguously numbered (prideandprejudice_01_austen.mp3 … prideandprejudice_61_austen.mp3), 643 MB, 11 h 09 min total, cataloged 2010-05-05.

The novel has 61 chapters and the item has 61 chapter files, so the count is the completeness check; no gaps, no duplicates, running order correct once sorted. Chosen over the two other complete solo readings (Karen Savage's 2007 version 3, the 2011 two-reader version 5) and the 2011 dramatic reading, which is an adaptation and out of scope.

Published on the source's record rather than a listen-through (owner decision, 2026-08-26): LibriVox proof-listens every completed project chapter by chapter before release, and the three pilots' full listens turned up nothing their project pages had not already said — so the chapter table and byte check above are the verification, and the first listener who finds a fault in this reading should write to the Den.

Two layers, both clear:

• The book. Published 28 January 1813 by T. Egerton, London; Austen died in 1817. The term expired long ago; no renewal question exists for a work of this age.
• The narration. LibriVox dedicates its recordings to the public domain; the item carries LibriVox's public-domain dedication. Recorded 2010 by Elizabeth Klett, credited on the project page.