So famous a first sentence that it's actually hard to approach from an analytical perspective. It sits in the centre of literature like a diamond, sparkling and edged and difficult to dismantle.

Jane Austen is a narrator famous for her comedies of manners and social satire, but popularly adored for her romances. In her most famous opening, she manages to pull off a complicated trick by establishing both her arch tone and her promising plot. Considered in detail, this sentence is a masterpiece of having it both ways.

'Universally acknowledged', for instance. The narrative voice claims with confident didacticism that it can speak for everyone, that the universal is within its purview. At the same time, obviously the truth is not universally acknowledged - or else the clever narrator and we, the clever readers, would not be able to laugh at the joke. Immediately we are flattered with a sense of superior understanding; society is a joke, and we are in on it. So far, so sarcastic - but at the same time, when one considers the plot, it's not as straightforward as all that.

We get the advantage of seeing through this conventional 'truth', but in fact, it's not what 'universally acknowledged' implies, which is to say, a piece of received wisdom. Instead, believing a rich man must want to marry is a piece of wishful thinking. Wealthy men are essential to the comfort of wealthless women, and to 'acknowledge' that a wealthy man must be eager to provide that comfort is to be sufficiently afraid of poverty that one convinces oneself that salvation will arrive somehow. By making fun of this fear as if it were a mere foolish proverb, Austen gives her first hint that in this novel, too, the fear will be assuaged. The threat of poverty hangs over the heroines, but fearing it is laughable. We are not really threatened.

For whatever the dangers that Austen hints at for her heroines, we always know they will not come to pass. Poverty is a wind howling at the door, but we are safe inside. The plot will bear this out: a single man in possession of a large fortune might not be in want of a wife, but in fact both Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy are quite keen to marry - and indeed, are both perfectly willing to set aside financial considerations to do so. Even the comfortably-off Mr Collins wants a wife; wealthy men in Pride and Prejudice are getting married right and left. The Jane Austen museum in Bath sells copies of her books, but it also sells tote bags imprinted 'I [heart] Mr Darcy'.* Irritating people are a threat in Austen books, but poverty will never truly bite. Marriage actually will save the day.

Consider, for instance, the order of the sentence, and its linguistic roots. Marked out by those nineteenth-century commas, it breaks down almost mathematically into its components: universal acknowledgement, single man with fortune, want of a wife. Society, man, marriage. This is the progression the plot will follow: we meet Elizabeth and Jane's setting, then their future husbands, then their happy endings.

Rhythmically, the sentence lands on its last word with a satirical but reassuring clang, the multi-syllabic, Latinate 'universally' and 'possession' shifting to the monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon 'want of a wife.' Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, discussing those two registers in English, quotes Simeon Potter's comment: 'We feel more at ease getting a hearty welcome than after being granted a cordial reception.' English is a language with Latin-Norman flesh and Anglo-Saxon bones. Austen was writing at a time when a debate about the relative merits of Latinate versus plain English had been passionately pursued for some time, and this sentence is highly aware of the distinctions. For satire of manners, we have ornate Latin. For blunt fun-poking, we have Anglo-Saxon ... but at the same time, it is Anglo-Saxon that conveys the truth. It is not true to say that it is universally acknowledged, but it is true, in this story, that the single men with large fortunes will want wives. Universal acknowledgement is a fussy fiction - both of the characters, such as Mrs Bennet, and of Jane Austen in her arch moments - but wanting a wife is real.

This, I suspect, is the essential appeal of Jane Austen's most famous novel. We get the best of both worlds: to see through the financial machinations of mothers but to marry a rich man anyway, to laugh at wishful thinking but to get our wishes granted, to scorn convention with merry, biting cynicism, but to succeed within its terms better than the people we are laughing at. Pride and Prejudice is an underdog fantasy, a tale of being a double winner - both as an undeceived outsider and as a triumphant insider. The class and gender conventions are avenged as we, with Elizabeth, both mock and resist them and still succeed by their rules. Austen is an angry writer, sometimes a furious one, sometimes even a hateful one - but my goodness, does she promise us the world.

*True fact; I went there on my honeymoon. Financial considerations, I suspect; a gift shop has to sell something, and if someone's visiting the museum at all it's a pretty good bet they already own copies of the books.