“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a
good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
The opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice epitomizes the traditional depiction of marriage that is prevalent throughout Romantic and Victorian era literature; a depiction that Virginia Woolf re-evaluates in To the Lighthouse through a modern presentation of marriage. In its traditional literary use, marriage serves a distinct purpose. A young woman must become married in order to ensure stability for her future, and a man must become married to fulfill his societal role. In the words of Jane Austen, the necessity of marriage is “universally acknowledged,” remaining unquestioned throughout the Romantic and Victorian periods of English literature. In this traditional use, marriage was the definitive goal of the text. The novel circulated around the will-they-or-wont-they atmosphere that young love can produce until the final chapters of the novel tied all the remaining questions of the story into one neatly-pressed knot of matrimony.
