Who cannot love the beginning of "Pride and Prejudice"?

In "A Fine Brush on Ivory" Richard Jenkyns says that Jane Austen presents the first two sentences as a pair: "This pair of aphorisms stands like the two pillars of a proscenium framing the stage. They are entirely generalized, they sit apart from the narration. Then abruptly the general gives way to the particular; the curtain rises, adn we are plunged immediately, without so much as a wod of explanation about the setting or the charactersm ubt the first scene of a comic drama..."

He also indicates that Jane Austen will have listened to Psalms in church almost every week, and likens the rhythm of these two sentences to the rhythms of Psalms, "with verse answering to verse...echoing, amplifying, or explaining..."

Thought you might find that interesting!