What is the name of the book that Mr. Collins reads aloud to the Bennets?

Mr. Collins reads aloud Fordyce's Sermons to the Bennet family in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The book is commonly identified more fully as James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women, a collection of moral and religious essays first published in 1766.

The scene occurs during Collins's visit to Longbourn. As a clergyman, he considers the sermons suitable reading for the Bennet daughters, but Lydia interrupts him before he has finished even three pages. Collins takes this as evidence that young women are uninterested in serious literature, although Austen makes his pompous judgment part of the joke.

Fordyce's work was written as conduct literature: books intended to instruct women in proper behaviour, modesty, religion, and domestic virtue. It is sometimes confused with The Vicar of Wakefield or Pilgrim's Progress, both famous eighteenth-century books, but neither is the text Collins chooses. The episode also shows how Austen uses reading habits to expose Collins's self-importance and the family's differing personalities.