I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

Elizabeth Bennet says this early in Jane Austen’s novel *Pride and Prejudice* during a conversation at Longbourn after the Meryton assembly, where Mr. Darcy’s aloof manner and his slighting remark about Elizabeth have become the talk of the neighborhood. Elizabeth, amused but also stung, frames her dislike of Darcy as a matter of wounded dignity: she might tolerate mere “pride” in a wealthy gentleman, but not when it has been directed at her personally. The line crystallizes the social atmosphere of small-town Regency England, where reputation, manners, and perceived slights carry outsized weight in courtship and community judgment.

The sentence is a compact confession of how personal injury shapes moral judgment. Elizabeth presents herself as principled—able to “forgive” pride as a general fault—yet admits that her resentment is rooted in her own “mortified” pride. Austen uses the symmetry of “his pride” and “mine” to expose the reciprocity of vanity: Elizabeth’s wit and self-respect are admirable, but they also predispose her to interpret Darcy through the lens of offense. The line foreshadows the novel’s central movement, in which both characters must recognize how pride and prejudice distort perception before genuine understanding and love become possible.