Marriage Quote by Jane Austen

Austen lands the line like a teacup set down a little too hard: polite, contained, and quietly accusatory. “Entirely” is the knife twist. It’s not just that marriage can go wrong; it’s that the culture pretending otherwise is running on fantasy and selective memory. In a world where marriage is treated as a woman’s primary economic plan, calling happiness “a matter of chance” isn’t romantic pessimism. It’s social realism with perfect manners.

The subtext is a critique of the era’s confidence game. Courtship rituals promise that good judgment, propriety, and a “suitable” match will yield lifelong contentment. Austen suggests those are at best weak predictors. You can screen for income, lineage, and surface virtue, but you can’t audit temperament, cruelty, boredom, or the slow grind of incompatibility. “Chance” names what the system refuses to admit: the stakes are enormous, the information is poor, and the consequences are irreversible.

It also reads as a quiet rebellion against moralizing narratives that blame unhappy wives for choosing badly. Austen’s heroines are taught to read character, but even the best reader can be misled in a market designed for performance. The line’s power comes from its calm delivery; it doesn’t rant, it shrugs. That shrug is devastating. It punctures the period’s myth that marriage is the reward for virtue, revealing it instead as a gamble dressed up as destiny.