In this film, Lizzie Dunford, Director of Jane Austen's House, shares the story of a remarkable first edition of Pride and Prejudice, once owned by Lady Caroline Lamb, a figure closely connected to Chatsworth House.

This copy of Pride and Prejudice is currently on display in our exhibition, House of Stories: Tales from the Chatsworth Library, available until 4 October 2026. The copy is on loan from Jane Austen's House.

Video Transcript

I have one of the four first editions of Pride and Prejudice that are part of our collection at Jane Austen's House. This one has a very special connection to Chatsworth House. It was owned by Lady Caroline Lamb, who was such a part of the circle here, whose portrait hangs here at Chatsworth.

This is one of the very first copies from the very first print run of that novel that hit the shelves and came to libraries 213 years ago.

Now, this is also a really fascinating time in Lady Caroline Lamb's life. She was an extraordinary woman, and at Jane Austen's house, we don't like to define extraordinary women just by the men in her lives, but it's slightly difficult with Lady Caroline Lamb... She's reading this in 1813. This is the year after her explosive and fiery love affair with Lord Byron had burnt out. So she is reading this novel at a time of pain, of heartbreak, when she is looking to rediscover who she is and herself. And in that, she is following a pattern that would continue for the next 200 years.

So many people find in this novel a place to escape, something to give hope, something to find yourself. As we all follow Elizabeth Bennet on that journey to Pemberley. this is a particularly fascinating copy, not just for its link to Caroline, but what it tells us about the history of the book itself.

Images 1-3; First Edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 1813, Lady Caroline Lamb’s leather bound copy, Jane Austen’s House. Image 4; Portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), Thomas Phillips, 1813, Devonshire Collection

Caroline's signature is on the front cover, and it has been ever so slightly cut off where the book has been rebound. There are beautiful patterns of wear where somebody has read and reread it, and it is so delicious to think that it would have been her hands that read that.

When these books were first purchased, they didn't look like this. They weren't beautifully leather bound, gilded objects. They were much more like today's paperbacks. They had blue covers. The pages were actually still uncut. When you were reading this for the first time, you had to take a letter knife to split open the pages. And those copies are achingly rare, because the vast majority of them that have survived are then bound and rebound to match libraries, to match personal tastes, and also to preserve them.

This book is an incredible survival from 213 years ago. We see here an object that contains so many different stories. It contains the story that we know of Pride and Prejudice of Elizabeth and Darcy and Jane and all those women and men that make up that world. But it's also the story of its readers; and that's what makes these artifacts so fascinating.

Image 1; Portrait bust of Lord Byron (1788-1824), Bertel Thorvaldsen, original plaster model, 1831, Devonshire Collection. Image 2; First Edition of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’, 1813, with gold-tooled leather binding, Devonshire Collection.

If you've read Pride and Prejudice today, you will have read it in one volume. This is how it was originally published in three different volumes one, two, and three. This is how novels of Austen's time were published. Austin uses this three volume technique very, very carefully.

The second volume is shorter, you can see it's slightly slimmer, but it does contain more of the narrative. It's towards the end of the second volume that we actually find the mentions of Chatsworth itself. This is where Lizzie is going off with her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, on a tour of the North. We have the glories of Chatsworth, of Matlock over the peak.

That makes you wonder as well, what most of felt this is to open this novel, this most fashionable novel of the season, and see the house, the home that you knew so well mentioned in it. Austen closes it by saying, "and to Pemberley, they were to go"; the end of volume two.

That meant for these first readers, you have an element of physicality coming into your reading. You have the anticipation of what's happening. That this amazing house that you've heard about from the very first chapters; Lizzie is about to go to it. The first reader, you have to close that volume. You had to go and find volume the third.

And that's something today that as readers of Austen, we don't have, we don't have that build up of anticipation for what's about to happen next, which is both a blessing because it means we can carry on completely enveloping ourselves in this gorgeous story. But I think there is a slight loss of that wait to go into that idealized, beautiful landscape and house, and for that next stage of Elizabeth Bennet's life to begin.