Reading Jane Austen as a moral philosopher

from The Philosopher's Beard

Jane Austen wrote romantic comedies about middle-class girls looking for a good husband among the landed gentry. If that were all there was to it we wouldn't take her any more seriously now than the genre hacks published by Mills and Boon. But Austen was also a brilliant moral philosopher who analysed and taught a virtue ethics for middle-class life that is surprisingly contemporary. Appreciating this can help us understand why she wrote the way she did and how we should read her today.

Austen is celebrated as a literary icon both for her genius and for her role in inventing the modern novel. Her first novel, Northanger Abbey (though by a quirk, not actually published until after her death) must particularly delight the modern academic of literature with its recursive irony and playful subversion of established rules and genres. Austen goes so far as to integrate a running discussion of the form, role, and importance of 'the novel' into the book, though the casual (or modern) reader would miss most of her references, allusions and parodies of her contemporary literary world. That exuberant display of literary genius was somewhat curtailed in Austen's later works, as she sought to balance literary style with popular (commercial) appeal.

The style Austen developed in her later works was distinctive for its very conventionality, or 'social realism'. Sir Walter Scott wrote glowingly of the ordinariness and realisticness of her characters and situations, which he contrasted positively to the competitive excesses of the romantic style. (Speaking of which, Charlotte Brontë rejected the "commonplace" and "confined" lives Austen described: "no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck".) As Scott saw it, there was real literary value and art to writing well about familiar lives and characters:

The author’s knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.

All this certainly makes Austen an important figure in the history of literature - the modern psychological novel comprising 'events in the mind of an imaginary person' originates in such a focus on ordinary lives. But it is not what makes her a classic who deserves to be read in the present in her own terms. To be blunt but brief, we can't read Scott's Austen anymore because the world and literature have moved on. In particular she can no longer be considered realistic, not only because present readers can't relate to the situation of the Regency landed gentry, but also because she doesn't meet contemporary literary standards

Full essay at The Philosopher's Beard