&quot;It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.&quot;<br><br>So begins <i>Pride and Prejudice,</i> Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the &quot;most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author's works,&quot; and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as &quot;irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.&quot;