Many girls dream of some day getting married to a prince in shining armour – the perfect man. One might wonder why. Are they enticed by the feeling of financial safety, or is it love? In this essay I will investigate the views on love and marriage in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Marian Keyes’ Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married (1997) and how these two concepts are related. The definition of romantic love, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, is “a strong feeling of affection for somebody that you are sexually attracted to”. Marriage, on the other hand, is ”the legal relationship between a husband and a wife”. These definitions show that love and marriage do not have to be related. One might think, though, that the female protagonists in these novels do not necessarily share the same views because of the two-hundred years between the writing of these two novels. Society has changed over the years, but have the morals and values, as reflected in the novels, really changed? Are marriages still mostly economic arrangements, as they were before, or is it more important to really love someone today in order to get married? In order for me to find this out, I will investigate the protagonists and their relationship to, and views of, men, parents, siblings and friends, as well as how society was during these different points of time. To conclude, despite men who mistreat them and disrespect them, Elizabeth and Lucy finally meet men who live up to their expectations of a future husband, and ironically, they have been close to them all the time. Ultimately, the protagonists’ views on love and marriage are not that different from each other, despite the time span, and they both feel that love is a necessity for marriage. This causes a greater discussion in Pride and Prejudice than in Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, because of the society’s expectations. Nowadays, women can be more independent in their choice of a boyfriend or husband, than they could in the eighteenth century. Ironically, though, many women of today strive to have, what we believe to be, the happy marriage we read about in e.g. Pride and Prejudice. With all the lack of true love and happiness that were during this time, one might wonder why.