THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

destitute and the widespread evidence of rural pauperism is glanced at only as the occasion of genteel charity or, as in
the case of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, as an occasion for scolding the poor ‘into harmony and
plenty’. The vast advances in industrialization and imperial expansion, and the social earthquake consequent upon
both, elicit mere allusions. The upper-middle-class world of Austen’s fiction is seen as secure in its values, its
privileges, and its snobberies. It is a society which defines itself very precisely in terms of land, money, and class and
it accepts that rank is an essential guinea-stamp. Its awareness of geographical space is generally revealed only with
reference to far-flung estates and to the incomes derived from them, and to forays into the fashionable society of
London or Bath. Its attachment to nature and to natural scenery is expressed in transitory enthusiasms for picnics at
Box Hill and trips to the seaside or for parkland disciplined and tidied up by landscape gardeners.
Jane Austen is far too subtle, challenging, and inventive a novelist to be usefully defined by negatives. Her work
may seem to stand apart from the preoccupations of many of her literary contemporaries, but it remains very much of
its time. It is, in many significant ways, defined in Christianly conservative, but not necessarily reactionary, terms
against current radical enthusiasms. It should also be seen as standing in, and presenting variations on, an established
fictional tradition. Where new writers who had espoused Jacobin libertarianism spoke of rights, Austen refers to
duties; where they look for steady human improvement, she remains sceptical about the nature of the fallen human
condition. The late eighteenth-century cultivation of sensibility and sentiment, and the new ‘Romantic’ insistence on
the propriety of passion, are consistently countered in her novels by an ironic exposure of affectation and by a steady
affirmation of the virtues of restraint. Austen chose her own literary limitations, not simply because she held that
‘three or four families in a country village’ were an ideal subject for the novel, but because her omissions were
considered and deliberate. Her moral message is infused with an ideological insistence on the merits of good conduct,
good manners, sound reason, and marriage as an admirable social institution. She never scorns love, but she balances
its often
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disconcerting and disruptive nature with a firm advocacy of the complementary qualities of self knowledge, self
discipline, and practicality. Her heroines can be as vivaciously intelligent as Elizabeth Bennet and as witty, egotistic,
and independent as Emma Woodhouse, but both, like the essentially introspective Elinor Dashwood or the passive and
self effacing Fanny Price, are finally brought to mature judgement and, by proper extension, emotional fulfilment. The
narrative line of Sense and Sensibility (1811), which balances maturity against impulsiveness, also systematically
undermines the attractions of superficial glamour and contrasts conflicting value systems and ways of seeing. In the
two other novels which were probably begun in the 1790s and later revised, Northanger Abbey (1818) and Pride and
Prejudice (1813), first impressions, illusions, and subjective opinions or prejudices give way to detachment, balance,
reasonableness and, more painfully, to humiliating reassessment. Mere cleverness, wit, or spontaneity, though
admirable in themselves, are never allowed to triumph without being linked to some steadier moral assurance.
The scrupulous pattern of education that Austen requires of her major characters (both male and female) is also
required of her readers. Those who merely seek to escape into a delicately placid and undemanding fictional world
wilfully misread her novels. Throughout her work, but especially in her three later novels, Mansfield Park (1814),
Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818), she obliges readers to participate in the moral processes of disciplined learning,
weighing, and judging, and in the gradual establishment of the principle that judgement is contingent upon
understanding. This is not to imply that Austen is either priggish or stridently polemic (she is, it should go without
saying, one of the most calculatingly amusing of all English novelists), but to suggest that her readers have to be
constantly alert to her tone and to her supple narrative method. The relatively restricted world of her novels, and the
social and physical confines of her settings, define the limits in which opinions are formed and within which her fools
and snobs, her bores and gossips, her prudes and poseurs, must be both endured and accepted. The illusion of actuality
which she so succinctly suggests also enforces a response to a society confident of its own codes and values. In Emma,
for example, we follow the heroine in her often wayward exploration of manipulations, misapprehensions, niceties,
complacencies, and lapses in judgement, but we also see her finding a personal liberation within the enclosure of the
society whose rules she learns to respect and use. Austen’s often astringent anti-romanticism is nowhere more evident
than in Mansfield Park, a novel centred on a heroine suffering from what she admits are ‘faults of ignorance and
timidity’, but also one who embodies, like the man she finally marries, a Christian forbearance which can be seen as
informing her grasp of tact and decorum. If the values of the novel, most clearly expressed in the embarrassments
surrounding the play-acting which so offend Sir Thomas Bertram, often seem to be at odds with twentieth-century
preconceptions of character and social action, for Austen such values are projected as
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essential to the happy development of human affairs. The relatively sombre tone of Persuasion also emphasizes the