Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.

Grinnell library catalog page

Butler’s main objective is to place Jane Austen within the political context in which she wrote, a time in which readers sought the political in all writing and the almost total absence of politics within Austen’s novels constituted a politically conservative stance and support for status quo social systems, posits Butler. In Austen’s world of leisured middle-class characters and unchanging country villages, the plots and “crucial action of her novels is in itself expressive of the conservative side in an active war of ideas” (294), Butler writes.

In the process of contextualizing Austen in Part I, Butler discusses sentimentalism, the philosophical underpinnings and examples of Jacobin novels such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, the Anti-Jacobins, whom Butler characterizes as powerful but rather talentless, and the works of the Jacobin, feminist, and politically ambivalent Maria Edgeworth.

In Part II, Butler discusses Austen’s major works. She rhetorically questions the worth of Austen’s work, given her conservatism and intellectual orthodoxy, but concludes that Austen’s skill in creating images and in balancing naturalism and moralism render her work still valuable. Her conservative values are established not only by the absence of politics in her novels, but also in the omission of the irrational and sensuous from the inner lives of her characters, her focus on the landed gentry, and the “ideal progress” (293) of her novels, in which the protagonist learns to accept social pressures and is rewarded with marriage.

Entered by Sara on 30 July 2004 at 5:19 PM.