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 A Stroke of Good Fortune "A Stroke of Good Fortune" is a short story by the American author Flannery O'Connor. It is one of the ten stories included in her short story collection "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", published in 1955. The story involves a woman who discovers to her disappointment and disbelief that she is pregnant. The story begins as Ruby Hill, a woman who has lately been suffering from minor illness, enters the door of her apartment building after shopping at the grocery store. Ruby begins to work her way up the stairs to her apartment,