a similar way to her heroine, by 25 years old she had: "Formed the opinions, prejudices and attitudes which were to remain with her to the end of life." She therefore understood the importance of Elizabeth developing as an individual before she can make an appropriate marriage. At the outset of the novel Austen presents Elizabeth as a light-hearted and self-assured character, the omnipresent narrative voice hinting to the reader that perhaps our heroine is a little too confident in her own assertions; "...and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister, and with a judgement unassailed by any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve of them."
             Lucy Honeychurch is a very different personality. Unlike Lizzie, she possesses the quality Gillie refers to as "virginality". His definition of this is to be: "unaware of and unconcerned with intrusion by the world which involves the individual in its anxieties and responsibilities and the complexities and corruptions that attend on them." Not only is Lucy clueless about marriage; she is baffled by life itself. Elizabeth has surpassed the immaturity of virginality and is far more self assured than Lucy; expressing her headstrong and naive views regarding both life and marriage quite freely. Jane Austen satirises both this over-confidence and society's attitude to marriage in her famously assured 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." Fowler noted: "the opening of 'Pride and Prejudice' deliberately flouts the maxim of quality for ironic purposes...her narrator claims a truth universally acknowledged a proposition which is manifestly not so." I think this supports the idea that Jane Austen does not entirely agree with either Mrs. Bennett's or Lizzie's misplaced and...