For example, in the opening of her novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen writes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” And while there is nothing all that remarkable about the vocabulary or syntax of that sentence, there is something so striking about its humor and its insight, and the economy with which that insight is delivered, that a reader of a certain age and personality, and perhaps even gender, will get no further than it, before closing the book, not because this reader doesn’t understand what he has read, but because he is almost distracted by his wonderment for the person who wrote it.