Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
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Summary
Pride and Prejudice opens with the most quoted sentence in English-language fiction. The line is delivered in Austen's free indirect style — it sounds like a universal truth, but it is in fact a satire of a very local truth held by a small set of country gentry. From the first words, the novel teaches the reader to read for irony.
Themes to continue
- Free indirect discourse — the narrator's voice and the characters' assumptions blur. Continuations that play with this slippage between truth and prejudice will land.
- The marriage market as economic structure — Austen's irony does not lift the pressure; it names it. The Bennet daughters need an income.
- Comedy of the social map — every conversation in this novel positions speakers against each other. A continuation can be entirely a dialogue.
Vocabulary
- A truth universally acknowledged — Austen's mock-philosophical opening. The phrase parodies the kind of weighty Latinate aphorism a critic might write.
- Want of a wife — older English usage of want meaning need or lack. Note the comic ambiguity.
Continuation prompts
- Continue with the Bennet household reading the news of Bingley's arrival.
- Switch viewpoint: the man with the good fortune. What does he know of the truth being acknowledged about him?
- Write a single page of dialogue around a tea table.
About the author
Jane Austen (1775–1817) wrote six completed novels in a relatively short life. Pride and Prejudice (1813) is her most popular. Austen worked in the small comic genre of the country novel and quietly perfected the use of free indirect style — the technique that allowed twentieth-century modernism to follow.