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 Bold Stroke for a Wife and Freeman as witnesses. Tradelove leaves claiming he will put in a good word with the other guardians as he made the Dutch trader believe he was the main man in charge of the marriage of Anne Lovely. On Periwinkle's way out he is smiling thinking that he had the good fortune of relieving his debt for his consent on an impossible marriage situation for the Dutch trader. Tradelove is seen to admire Dutch traders claiming they know stocks and trade best of all nations and yet he makes a wager with confidence against the Colonel based on the letter