A Comparative Study of Plato’s and Jane Austen’s Concept of Love in Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice demonstrates the encounter of the two ruling faculties ofhuman beings: reason and passion. The characters of this novel who are mostly young peopleare involved in the matters of heart and mind, seeking love and affection from their belovedones while simultaneously burdened by the codes of manners and mannerisms of their society.Although many studies have been conducted on the subject of marriage and love on Austen’snovels, the nature of this love has not been given its proper attention. A comparative study ofPlato’s concept of love and that envisaged in Jane Austen’s novel clarifies a lot of things amongwhich we can refer to their difference in the extent of realism as the former depicts love inits ideal form and the latter in its practical sense. Serving as a means to deepen the readers’understanding, this essay introduces a new perspective to Austen studies by examining Platonicconcepts of love in Pride and Prejudice in the light of the information gleaned from Plato’s twofamous works that directly deal with the concept of love: Phaedrus and Symposium. The studyshows that despite being Platonic in her approach to love, Austen differs from Plato in that shetries to confine love to decorum under the veil of social relationships which bespeaks of the factthat Austen’s time in early Victorian period gives priority to the practice of love in a real contextover intellectual concern for what it might mean or might not.