does this femous line used as a forshadowing of the comming events in novol and makes the reader have a brief view about the main idea of the book?
The first line of the novel--"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"--is among the most famous first lines in literature. It not only calls the reader's attention to the central place that marriage will have in the plot of the story, but also introduces the reader immediately to Austen's use of irony. While the focus of the line is on "a single man . . . in want of a wife," the real emphasis in the noveland in the society of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuriesis the need for young women to find a husband in possession of a good fortune. The purely economic, utilitarian motive for marriage will come under attack in the novel, as will, implicitly, the societal constraints which leave many women with little choice but to marry for the sake of economic survival.
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