First Lines Friday #5

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

First Lines:

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’

As far as first lines go, these are pretty famous. Can you guess the novel?

Here’s a hint: the author is super famous–the gif above is from a movie based on one of her other books.

Seriously, these gifs are giving it away, literally.

Aaaaand, speaking of a single man in possession of a good fortune, it’s Fitzwilliam Darcy! Yes! These first lines are from the hugely popular Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice.

If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you give it a try. I have a few friends who hadn’t read it because they thought it would be “sappy,” and I assure you that it is not that. It’s social satire at its best. Austen is legitimately funny and fun to read, it’s not just about the romance.