It is widely recognized that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice deeply explores the formation of knowledge, particularly in the bildung of its protagonist Elizabeth Bennet. This essay offers an interpretation and explanation of how Austen portrays the process of knowledge formation. As I contend, the standard historicist interpretation of the novel through the classical empiricism of John Locke and David Hume, who emphasized that knowledge is based on aggregating immediate sense impressions, only explains the failures of Austen’s characters in forming beliefs. How her characters arrive at justified and true beliefs merits an ahistorical interpretation through the theory-laden empiricism of Willard Van Orman Quine and Thomas Kuhn, who emphasized how theories interpret experience in various ways. In the two central moments of Elizabeth’s epistemic bildung, her reading of Mr. Darcy’s letter and her touring his house, Elizabeth follows the path to knowledge put forth by Quine and Kuhn: she considers alternative narratives, or theories, and finds the one that reinterprets her observations in the most coherent light. The paradigm of Elizabeth’s epistemic success enables an interpretive shift to viewing the construction of narratives as the central epistemological focus of the novel, rather than the fallibility of impressions. Austen’s portrayal of knowledge formation shows how as a novelist she intuited a central premise of human nature, our need to construct narratives about our experience, that would take more than a century for philosophy to formalize.