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 Good Man in Africa (novel) the collection was actually written before the novel, though Boyd claimed he had written both when he sent the collection to potential publishers. Hamish Hamilton agreed to publish the novel (as yet unwritten) and collection in that order, Boyd admits "So I said to my new editor, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, 'Look, the manuscript is in a shocking state, I just need a couple of months to knock into shape’, and I sat down and wrote "A Good Man in Africa" in a white heat of dynamic endeavour in three months at my kitchen table. William Boyd grew up in Western Africa,