jane austen seems to be saying in her
novels that reading carves out a private
space for the reader a space in which
they can indulge fantasies and also work
over their own moral dilemmas and
problems through the activities of
others and I think this is what she saw
as the purposes of her own novels that
she combined a close social realism with
a certain moral seriousness a belief
that the actions of the novel's the
kinds of activities her characters are
indulging in which after all are the
activities of everyday life
activities like falling in love the
relationships between parents and their
children getting on with one's neighbors
trying to work out who means us well and
who might not the ordinary morality of
life she is feeding that into the novel
and suggesting that the new novel that
she is carving out should be concerned
with those issues and this is new
because the novel as she finds it in the
early 19th century is full of
extravagant plots adventures improbable
incidents and what she strips away is
that in probability concentrating
instead on the lives of people rather
like the rest of us if we accept that
the rest of us are as it were the
middling classes and the the in the
gentry
we try to reduce her novels to their
plot elements we find that there is very
little there you know these are not the
stories of abandoned babies who find
themselves kidnapped and sent off to sea
and eventually discover that they are
the long-lost children of dukes these
are novels in which you know the most
important the things that may happen are
whether or not we can afford to have a
ball in the village when exactly we will
put it on and whether we'll follow it
with a picnic you know that can be the
whole of Jane Austen's plot in her own
day readers quickly realized that she
was doing something new in the novel and
she gained a very respectable reputation
as an ambitious novelist
to further new ingredients that she
brings to the novel ah the interior
space that she carves out for the
heroine instead of her novels being a
stream of adventures that are enacted in
the world outside the psychic space of
the heroine becomes increasingly
important we see this developing in the
novel as as she works with it and so
it's at its most intense in her later
levels in Emmer and persuasion for
example where we find that we spend as
much time inside the heroine as we do
engaging with the events outside and I
think the other really important
ingredient is her introduction of
conversation into the novel and by that
I mean something like the real exchanges
that real people have so you find that
there are conversations that stumble
where characters speak across each other
where characters sometimes begin to
mimic one another as we do in
conversation the novel before Jane
Austen tended to have monologues the
characters expand dramatically across a
room one to the other and indeed after
Jane Austen that's often the way with
conversation she is quite remarkable I
think in bringing something natural into
the novel and that's her contribution to
the development of social realism at
this time
I think a sign of how well she was
developing many of these natural
features in the novel is that several of
her readers did write to her and say oh
and mr. Collins
he's obviously our vicar or another
character mrs. Elton she's just like
somebody I know you must know her too
the assumption was that Jane Austen was
not just describing as it were a
fictional distillation of her own
society but people recognized people
they knew within her characters and this
of course caused her great amusement and
as she said and if she was making it up
but she's making it up from the
observable ingredients of real life
you