Empiricism related with "Pride and prejudice"

The first reference of the book to the empiricism appears just on the first sentence when it says “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” which is similar to the starting sentence of Locke’s “Essay concerning human understanding”. In the Locke’s treatise or essay it starts saying something like this in reference to European rationalists who thought that there were innate ideas and universal ideas in the human moral and understanding, but in contrast, Locke thought that the innate ideas and the universal ideas didn’t exist, so he used that sentence ironically. In the same way Jane Austen, the writer of the book, uses this sentence ironically to say that a lot of people thinks that but it isn’t true or it shouldn’t be true, showing her clear feminist ideology.

The relation between the book and the empiricism is especially focused on the term prejudice. The empiricism defends that the knowledge is determined only by experience derived from sense perception. This could be confused with prejudice, but this sense perception that Locke defends is not the first impression or view using only a sense but a knowledge achieved by using all our senses and built with the repeated experiences. In the book we see that the prejudices are made by the first impressions or the first experiences but like the empiricism we need some repeated experiences and to know more details to get a good and a specific idea about people or about things.