Bennet family

Bennet family, fictional characters in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813). Mr. Bennet is an intelligent but eccentric and sarcastic man who is fond of his two oldest daughters—especially his favourite, Elizabeth—but scorns the rest of the family. He does not care for society’s conventions and mocks his wife’s obsession with finding suitable husbands for their daughters. Mrs. Bennet is a woman of little sense and much self-pity. The oldest daughter, Jane, is sweet-tempered and modest and is her sister Elizabeth’s confidant and friend. Elizabeth, the heroine of the novel, is intelligent and high-spirited. She shares her father’s distaste for the conventional views of society as to the importance of wealth and rank. She is therefore initially prejudiced against the aristocratic hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy, because of what she sees as his excessive pride amounting to arrogance. She revises her opinion of him but retains her disdain for those who use their position in society to intimidate others. The third daughter, Mary, is plain, bookish, and pompous. Lydia and Kitty, the two youngest, are flighty and immature girls.