The slow and ponderous beginning of Sense and Sensibility, which details the Norland family, the estate and its entail, contrasts with the theatrical tour de force of Pride and Prejudice's opening, which mimics Samuel Johnson's mocking generalisations on the human condition – ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ There follows a quick antiphonal dialogue expressing the marriage of Mr and Mrs Bennet, comically at odds with what Austen later described in her ‘Plan of a Novel’ as usual novel style: ‘Book to open with the description of Father & Daughter – who are to converse in long speeches, elegant Language – and a tone of high, serious sentiment’ (LM, p. 226). When talk ends, the method switches to direct narrative comment of the sort usually preceding conversation in fiction; it declares what the attentive reader has already concluded: that Mr Bennet is an ‘odd mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice’ and his wife a woman ‘of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper’ whose ‘business of … life’ is to get her daughters married. But the reader should be on guard: the narrative voice limits itself. Not stressed is the absence of Mr Bennet's ‘business of … life’, the proper care of a father for his numerous and precariously placed family. Five unprepared girls about to make the choices that will determine their adult futures should be a father's ‘business’ – especially in the light of his own unsatisfactory marriage. The narrator will not be a crutch for inattentive reading.

Such different accounts

Jane Austen famously called Pride and Prejudice ‘light & bright & sparkling’ (L, p. 203). Together with its epigrammatic minimal style, this sparkle has made it probably the most reread novel in English. The comedy of the opening sequence permeates the book and, although much happens that could have pathetic, even tragic, consequences, disasters are more successfully averted here than in Sense and Sensibility, in part because of better luck – the father does not die – in part because the reader sees much through the eyes of a vivacious, essentially cheerful heroine very different and differently placed from Elinor Dashwood.