What Does It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife mean?

You're looking at one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature.

This is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and it basically sets up everything to come.

Mr. Bingley, a young and rich bachelor, has moved into town, and mother-cum-matchmaker Mrs. Bennet, with her five unmarried daughters, is set on making him fall for at least one of them.

The line—spoken by the snarky narrator—is, of course, a little tongue-in-cheek. A single, wealthy man isn't necessarily in need of a wife, but Mrs. Bennet is certainly in need of a single, wealthy man. By using the words "truth universally acknowledged," Austen parodies the philosophical works of the time—as if saying it makes it so. 

Austen is having a bit a fun while introducing us straightaway to the main plot element of her novel: marriage.

Where you've heard it

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that __________."

Fill in the blank and have fun.

Pretentious Factor

If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of 1-10.

This opening line is so well known that reciting it could hardly be considered pretentious. Just remember to maintain the sarcasm.

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We all know it. The Pride and Prejudice first line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

It’s a quote so famous that it’s used as a basis for commentary on nearly everything, with the nouns being swapped in to fit the topic. The line has been used in everything from the parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (“it is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains”) to articles that pick apart the use of famous quotes themselves (such as this article by The Telegraph, with the rather meta title ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that great words will be misquoted’).

Austen acknowledges these high stakes, while quietly mocking the fact that this scramble to marry has to exist at all. After all, despite living in the same social circle as the Bennett family, Austen never married, built a solid (if necessarily secret) writing career, and used her work to critique the conservatism and hypocrisy of her time, something explored in Helena Kelly’s recent book Jane Austen, The Secret Radical.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Pride and Prejudice‘s first line has endured in the public consciousness is that this pressure to marry still exists for women today, albeit slightly changed.

Think of the number of Hallmark movies out there where a high-powered career woman learns that the thing she’s really missing in her life is the love of a good man – while her financial future is secure, her projected emotional future, we’re supposed to believe, is as bereft of that as one of Austen’s lonely maiden aunts. The possibility that a career itself can be fulfilling isn’t considered in the kind of stories that draw on the surface of Pride and Prejudice without looking at the social critique that lies beneath. And as many women know, the real world has internalised this narrative (days after I’d finished my PhD, I was chatting to an acquaintance in my university cafe, who made the comment “so I suppose you’ll be getting married now?” I wasn’t even dating at the time). The first line of Pride and Prejudice has kept its place as a popular quote not only because it’s a great satirical comment on social expectations of women, but also because, as in Austen’s time, there’s a fair chunk of people who still don’t get the irony.

It’s a playful line that, in turn, is easy for writers to play around with. Modern-day Bennett Girl Bridget Jones comments “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces”, something any twenty- to thirtysomething can relate to. Terry Pratchett, who was sometimes “accused of literature” and sometimes sneered at by critics who claimed that his works were no such thing, used the line to flip a jovial bird at both camps in his book Snuff: “Vimes thought for a moment and said, ‘Well, dear, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a man with a lot of wood must be in want of a wife who can handle a great big—’” No matter what the medium, there’s a writer out there who’s used the line, whether it’s being adapted for a tweet or used as a light-hearted introduction to a web page.

Having a stonking good first line is one of those pieces of writing advice that everyone can agree on, and with Pride and Prejudice, Austen proved that it’s possible to write a first line that people will remember for hundreds of years. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of truths will be universally acknowledged in the years to come.

For a more melancholy famous line, read Book Riot’s exploration of The Last Line of The Great Gatsby. If you want more pithy Austen goodness, look at our Best Pride and Prejudice Quotes.

An 1894 engraving depicts chapter 18 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Geoff Nunberg (@GeoffNunberg) is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.

Shortly after Amazon introduced the Kindle, they put up a page with a ranked list of the most frequently highlighted passages across all the books. It's not there anymore, but when I first looked at the list in 2013, the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice was in third place. That was all the more impressive because eight of the other top 10 finishers were passages from the Hunger Games series, which was the hit of the season that year, as Austen's novel had been exactly 200 years earlier.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

We can argue about whether that's the most famous first line in English literature or whether the honor belongs to the opening sentence of Moby Dick or A Tale of Two Cities or 1984. But there's no other opening sentence that lends itself so well to sampling, mash-ups and adaptation.

If you're looking to add a literary touch to your article on pension schemes or emergency contraceptives, you're not going to get very far with "Call me Ishmael." But "It is a truth universally acknowledged" is always available as an elegant replacement for "As everybody knows" when you want to introduce some banal truism.

The phrase is ubiquitous in the age of Jane-o-mania. Rummage around on the Internet and you'll learn that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a "pop star in possession of a good fortune must be in want of baubles," that business class is more comfortable than economy, that "online dating sucks" and, needless to say, that Jane Austen "has left quite a mark on pop culture."

Here's the puzzling thing. Those adaptations of Austen's sentence are almost never ironic or facetious. They only underscore the prevailing wisdom, rather than throwing it into question.

Yet my guess is that a large portion of the people who adapt that sentence know perfectly well that the original version is anything but straightforward. It may be the single most celebrated example of literary irony in all of English literature. Pick up a paperback of Pride and Prejudice at a garage sale and it's even money you'll find the first sentence underlined with "IRONY" written in the margin.

The sentence may look like a truism, but the first part actually undermines the second. In her book Why Jane Austen, Rachel Brownstein points out that if the novel had begun simply with "A single man possessed of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," we'd snuggle in for a stock romantic story. We might expect the next sentence to describe an aristocratic Colin Firth lookalike galloping full-tilt toward the Bennets' house at Longbourn.

But prefacing that clause with "It is a truth universally acknowledged" implies that's only what most people say they believe — after all, if everybody really does accept it, why bother to mention the fact? In fact, as Austen says in the following sentence, nobody really cares what the wealthy man himself thinks he needs. There's only one truth that matters to Mrs. Bennet and the other families in the neighborhood — that a daughter who has no fortune must be found a well-to-do husband to look after her, which Mrs. Bennet has made "the business of her life."

But we suspect that Austen has her reservations about that single-minded pursuit of an advantageous marriage, even if she doesn't say so outright. And we're flattered to think that she counts on astute readers like us to pick up on that, while others will miss it. It makes us feel complicit with her. As the modernist writer Katherine Mansfield wrote in 1920, "every true admirer of [Austen's] novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone — reading between the lines — has become the secret friend of their author." (That pronoun "he" gives us a start now, but bear in mind that back then the most prominent Austen devotees were the male literati of the Bloomsbury set.)

Austen's sentence is a masterpiece of indirection, and it's no wonder that people keep trying to repurpose it in the hope that they can pluck it from its original context and its irony will somehow cling to its roots. But that can't happen without the covert wink, the tip-off to the sharp reader that the truth isn't as pat as the rest of the sentence makes it seem. Otherwise, the phrase is an empty gesture. It merely signifies irony, the way an empire waistline or a neck cloth signifies Regency gentility.

OK, it's just a sentence. But it points to what always happens when Austen is repackaged for export. There have been some wonderful stage, film and TV adaptations of Pride and Prejudice over the years. But as charming as they are, they can only depict the second half of that opening sentence, the Colin Firth bits. We get a beguiling story of romance and courtship. But we don't see it at Austen's skeptical remove. We miss the arched eyebrow, the sly and confiding voice.

That's the paradox of Austen's novels. Like the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, they cry out for adaptation. They seem infinitely resilient: You can relocate them to Beverly Hills or Delhi; rewrite them as murder mysteries or erotica; populate them with vampires or zombies — they'll always retain some trace of their original appeal. Yet there are few other novels so unwilling to give up their souls.