Though the novel was generally well-received, garnering favorable reviews with noted critic George Henry Lewes and even the future wife of Lord Byron, who called it “the fashionable novel,” not everyone loved “Pride and Prejudice.” In a letter to Lewes, Charlotte Bronte called the novel “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but... no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck.” The biggest surprise? Even Austen herself dismissed the novel as “rather too light, and bright, and sparkling.”
