An eligible bachelor is a bachelor considered to be a particularly desirable potential husband, usually due to wealth, or social status.
In the United Kingdom, the heir to the throne or someone close in succession is often considered to be the nation's, or the world's most eligible bachelor, due to their social status, as has happened with Prince Charles and Prince William.
Jane Austen's novels are often concerned with the heroine's relationship with an eligible bachelor. Jane Austen's Emma particularly concerns a woman's attempt to obtain a husband for her friend by embellishing the truth. The gentleman in that case sees it as an example of the matchmaker's creativity and falls in love with her.
Read more about Eligible Bachelor: Homosexuals As apparent Eligible Bachelors, Sociology, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words eligible and/or bachelor:
“A man of great employments and excellent performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the resolution of a certain “Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men should be held eligible who are under seventy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)