Pride and Prejudice the girls marry well in order to support the others upon his death. Jane Austen's opening line, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife", is a sentence filled with irony and playfulness. The novel revolves around the importance of marrying for love, not simply for money, despite the social pressures to make a good (i.e., wealthy) match. "Pride and Prejudice" has long fascinated readers, consistently appearing near the top of lists of "most-loved books" among both literary scholars and the general public. It has
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