It is known across the globe that Jane Austen’s opening line to Pride and Prejudice is one of the greats in all of literature. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” A close second would be Tolstoy’s: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” from Anna Karenina.
Not to forget Dickens and his: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ...” in A Tale of Two Cities. Or George Orwell’s: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” opening to Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Of course, there’s LP Hartley’s The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” And JK Rowling’s opening to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: “Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
Yes, we could spend the day at this! Nor should we forget Irish authors. Here’s Beckett’s opening to Murphy: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Sublimely miserable! This brings us to Frank McCourt’s book Angela’s Ashes: “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.”
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Most people think the opening line to that story is: “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” It came next.
Joyce resorted to child-speak in opening his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ...” He was altogether more conventional in when it came to Ulysses: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a razor and a mirror lay crossed.”
But one of my all-time favourite opening lines has to be “Yer wha’?” from Roddy Doyle’s, The Snapper. And she was!
Snapper: Dublin slang word for a baby.
