Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet's Term Paper

Leading up to (and following) Elizabeth's epiphany, Pride and Prejudice is essentially about how Elizabeth and Darcy slowly overcome their misconceptions; misunderstandings; weaknesses, and mistakes, to at last find love and happiness together. Both "pride" (personal and social, that is) and "prejudice" (the pre-judging, or perhaps more accurately, the misjudging, of one person by the other) create, before that point, considerable roadblocks to the love the two eventually find together. For example, based on her misconceptions, Elizabeth firmly rejects Darcy's first proposal of marriage, and does not realize her error in judgment for quite some time.

Fortunately for Elizabeth, the strength of her own character, and her intelligence, wit, and personal charm allow her to retain Darcy's interest up until the time of her epiphany. Meanwhile, also, Elizabeth experiences many distractions, e.g., her mother; her sisters, their suitors, and all of their various actions and intrigues (including Lydia's mysterious disappearance); her father's remoteness, which likely cloud her thinking, but also, in a more positive sense, enable her to later make more favorable comparisons between Darcy and others she knows, particularly her sisters' suitors, so that she may then more clearly see Darcy for who he really is.

Elizabeth Bennet's epiphany in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, then, occurs when Elizabeth finally acknowledges to herself that her impressions of Darcy, which had caused her, earlier on, to reject his marriage proposal, were mistaken.When Elizabeth later sees clearly the true goodness of Darcy's character, she is able to overcome her own pride (at having been wrong about him) as well as her erroneous prejudice against him. That is the moment of Elizabeth's epiphany within the novel......