Styles and themes of Jane Austen plain meaning of a statement with the comic, undermining the meaning of the original to create ironic disjunctions. In her juvenile works, she relies upon satire, parody and irony based on incongruity. Her mature novels employ irony to foreground social hypocrisy. In particular Austen uses irony to critique the marriage market. Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of "Pride and Prejudice": "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." At first glance, the sentence is straightforward and plausible,
A Stroke of Good Fortune and Ruby's neighbor, Laverne Watts, was an early rendition of "Wisebloods" Leora Watts. The story was first published as "The Woman on the Stairs" in the August 1949 issue of "Tomorrow", and was later published as "A Stroke of Good Fortune" in the spring 1953 issue of "Shenandoah". By 1955 O'Connor had revised it so as to include it in the short story collection "A Good Man is Hard to Find". John McDermott notes that "A Stroke of Good Fortune" has been "dismissed by most critics as one of the least effective of Flannery O'Connor's short stories." O'Connor herself found