ABSTRACT
Pride and Prejudice, is probably one of the best-known examples of irony in the language. Like all irony it moves, as it were, in several different directions simultaneously. A dramatic situation is established by the irony, but it is established by means of tone, and tone is a resource which is necessarily unavailable to the dramatist. The novelist can avail himself of the many infinitely subtle gradations between the direct address to the reader and the fully dramatic presentation in which the narrator as such may be said to withdraw himself completely from the action. The full flavour of the situation in She Stoops to Conquer derives from the ignorance of both Young Marlowe and Mr Hardcastle. But there is another kind of irony which derives from our complicity or shared knowledge with one of the characters at the expense of others.
