Austen’s First Law
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Ms. Austen used this law as the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice (1813) and it is in fact the key to the novel whose action revolves around Mrs. Bennet’s quest to make good marriages for each of her five daughters. The novel’s second sentence reinforces the opening one:
“However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on 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.”
No doubt Mrs. Bennet would have agreed thoroughly with Ben Franklin’s observation in a letter of June 25th 1745 to a friend (identity not known) that “A single man . . . is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.” Completeness does not always guarantee satisfaction however as evidenced by Gabor’s Corollary:
“A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished” (Zsa Zsa Gabor, Newsweek, March 28th 1960).
Jane Austen by the way was not yet twenty-one when she began writing this great novel in October of 1796. She finished it the following August. Pride and Prejudice was not published until 1813, however, due to what the Encyclopaedia Britannica (13th edition 1926) gently terms “the blindness of publishers.”
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