The comedy of manners is most entertaining when it is generously spiced with ill-manners. Jane Austen seems to have realized this instinctively, for she uses social rudeness as a motivating dramatic force often, and builds one novel largely around it. Her people live within, if not always by, a strict code of manners; without some such code, rudeness could not exist. Practically all novelists who are also social commentators recognize this truism and take advantage of it for incidental effects, but Miss Austen goes farther: in Pride and Prejudice she makes rudeness a part of the novel's fabric.

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