Introduction: A Few Big Issues to set up Chapter One

Why was everyone so nuts about getting married?

This can be boiled down, rather cynically, to the answer "Money", or a little less cynically to "Survival".  The Bennets and the people they associated with were part of this awkward piece of British society called "Gentry"--not royalty or aristocrats, but with almost as many rules and standards.  Being considered gentry was a little more flexible than the higher ranks, but basically you had to come from a "good"/old family, or be very wealthy and then behave in certain ways like buying land.  If you owned a nice house, or a decent estate (plot of land, usually with a home and gardens but sometimes including a small town with farmers and a church) you were gentry.  If your family used to, and you still have good manners and follow the right rules, then you're gentry even if you somehow lost your money and/or land.  If your family got money through business (like being a trader or shopkeeper), well, it's not ideal, but if you play your cards right and buy the right home and act the right way, you can work your way in (but people might still look down on you).  

Essentially, it was one of those things that is really, really complicated to explain, but that everyone just knew back in Regency times (that's the era we're talking about, by the way, which roughly translates to "the earlyish 1800s").  Think about celebrities now.  There's a difference between Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts and Lindsay Lohan, right?  They're all, broadly speaking, actresses.  And I, for one, would have a hard time explaining to someone from a different culture exactly why I would go see Meryl Streep play Lady Macbeth, but probably neither of the other two.  Characters in Jane Austen novels make those kinds of distinctions based on family/wealth/manners/etc.  

So anyway, if you're the Bennets, you have certain standards of living to uphold.  Girls from families like theirs were not expected to ever work for money.  The worst case scenario, for one of them, would be to go be a governess, living with a family from their class but slightly richer, and teaching/chaperoning the girls in that family.  To be a governess, if you came from a family like the Bennets, would be relatively disgraceful.  (If you came from a poor family but had managed to get an education, being a governess was a great job.  It's like how people thought it was a strange choice for Meryl Streep to do Mamma Mia, but everyone was really proud of Lindsay Lohan for holding it together long enough to make Herbie Fully Loaded.)  

If you can't work, you better hope you've got money coming in from somewhere.  If you were lucky, your dad had plenty of money to leave you after he died, which usually came in the form of funds that produced interest--one big lump sum could be left in the bank and you'd just take out the interest each year and live on that, so the money never dried up.  This was definitely the simplest way to get money if you were a lady back in this era.  The other, of course, was to get married.  

Sounds simple, right?  But, surprise surprise, all the rich folks tended to marry each other.  Someone like a Bennet sister, who stood to inherit not quite a thousand pounds, would be at a disadvantage when competing for eligible bachelors.  (Although, a note about the money:  that would be a great inheritance in today's dollars, translated for the passage of time and the conversion to American money.  Using the very rough metric of "multiply by 50", that's close to 50,000 pounds or around $80,000.  If you're a modern woman with a career, $80,000 is fantastic.  If it's what you have to live on for the rest of your life, not so much.)  

And then there is the matter of the entailment.  This is what really fouls things up for the Bennet girls.  An entailment is this thing in British law that let men (who did all the property owning) leave their property not only to specific members of the next generation, but also the one after that.  So, whichever guy in the extended Bennet family owned Longbourn (the family estate) before Mr. Bennet (let's call him Grandpa Bennet) decided to create an entailment.   And Grandpa Bennet decreed, "Longbourn shall pass down the generations of my family through the male line," which meant, "You better hope you have boys or your wife and daughters will get kicked out when you die."  So, when Mr. Bennet dies, Longbourn goes to the next male in line, who happens to be this cousin Mr. Collins.  The less said about him the better, except that he is probably not inclined to give up this nice place to live out of the goodness of his heart after Mr. Bennet dies.  

To make a very long story short:  since the five Bennet girls (and Mrs. Bennet!) need to be provided for after Mr. Bennet's death but CAN'T inherit the family home, the girls really, really need to marry well.  Or at least one or two of them do, and they can provide for the rest.  

So when Austen opens with the line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," she's throwing the reader right into this screwy, cynical world where men have all the power and money, and women have all the desperation.  (When a cute new kid comes to school:  He or she MUST need a boyfriend/girlfriend!)  (Also: memorize that line, or get pretty close.  It's one people will throw around and it's good to have it in your back pocket.