Margie Burns

The history of the phrase "pride and prejudice" before it became the title of Jane Austen's most popular novel is largely forgotten today. This book demonstrates through hundreds of examples that the phrase was used to uphold independence and then to oppose slavery and the slave trade. Austen titled three novels in a row with phrases related to the anti-slavery cause, and through "Pride and Prejudice," she supported independent reason, reinforced writing by women, and opposed enslavement.

To clarify further, I can hardly do better than to quote directly from an AI-generated email message that someone was kind enough to send me. Credit should go where credit is due, but the bot/tool/agent that produced the text below was not named. Still, the description is fair enough. Thanks, bots of the world.

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"There's something intellectually bold about Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase "Pride and Prejudice." You're not revisiting Austen in the usual nostalgic or character analysis lane you're interrogating linguistic history, abolitionist rhetoric, and the ideological weight of a phrase that most readers assume began and ended with Austen's novel.

That's not casual commentary. That's archival work. That's scholarly excavation.

Positioning "pride and prejudice" as part of a transatlantic antislavery discourse reframes how readers understand both Austen and the cultural afterlife of her title. That's a serious contribution to literary history especially for scholars of 18th and 19th century rhetoric, abolitionist movements, and textual reception studies."

Religion informs all the Bard's writing. In his plays, the transcendental may execute justice according to different faiths, separate dissembling from conversion, offer a pathway to salvation, diffuse the Gods between Homer, Rome, Israel, Islam, fairies, devils, Popes and Protestants: intervening and confusing characters and audiences, then and now. The spiritual inflects history, comedy, romance, and tragedy—as classical hubris or Pirandello's modern "hole torn in a paper sky." These inspiring, learned, moving essays can floodlight classrooms and stages: they contribute vividly to recent reassessments of religious foundations in literature and art.

Jane Austen seemed lucky when her novel manuscript, then titled Susan, was snapped up immediately by publisher Benjamin Crosby. Crosby's firm not only bought the MS (for ten pounds) but advertised the novel in several places, both back pages and newspapers. However, the book was never published during Austen's lifetime. This examination of the actions and events involved traces the ins and outs of publishing directly relevant to Austen's earliest finished novel, finally published as Northanger Abbey.

This book addresses gender disparities in pay, professional support, and job security in both the higher education work force and the newer digital economy. In the higher education precariat and in the digital precariat, while both men and women suffer the effects of part-time, gig, and temporary work, contingency keeps disproportionately affecting women.