Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. For my mother, Bonnie Burrows, in honor of her birthday “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” There are few opening lines to novels as famous as this one. The novel in question is, of course, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Published in 1813, the novel spins out from this opening line. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice is a classic – maybe the classic – example of a “marriage plot” novel. This type of novel drives forward to marriage, a wedding (or two!) by novel’s end. It will seem in a marriage plot novel (or marriage plot film) that the star-crossed lovers will never find, meet, and/or reconcile with each other – but inevitably they do, and by definition, they marry. (For a thoughtful take on the marriage plot, see Adelle Waldman’s New Yorker article, “Why the Marriage Plot Need Never Get Old.”) While Austen didn’t invent the marriage plot, she is perhaps the greatest