Jane Austen

ethics and social order

pp. 184-195

in: Robert Grant, The politics of sex and other essays, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

I have argued above that fiction (Shakespeare), or its imaginative resources (Burke), may paradoxically be the only means of doing full justice to political facts. No new apology, therefore, seems due for recruiting Jane Austen to the same ranks. It is true that she shows no interest in politics in its normal, everyday sense. But the quiet, implicit politics of private life — her novelistic universe — may very well have the strongest of all claims to our attention, as being the closest to the pristine cultural experience that politics generally — at least of the conservative stamp — exists to describe, understand, and defend.