1775–1817
2 passages in library
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
— Jane Austen
Novelist of manners and marriage in Regency England, Austen built entire moral worlds out of drawing-room conversation. Her narrator hovers just behind her characters' thoughts, letting irony do the judging so she never has to state it outright. Two centuries on, her opening lines are still studied as some of the sharpest in the language.
Free indirect style—narration colored by a character's own voice
Irony that trusts the reader to catch it
Character revealed through dialogue, not description
Wit balanced by precise social observation
Sentences that seem polite while quietly cutting
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Emma
Persuasion
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