The ‘Irresponsibility’ of Jane Austen*

No one would deny that the pleasures and perceptions Jane Austen offers her readers can be of a very complex kind. The idea of that tradition takes for granted, above all, a complete and confident knowledge of the minds of the authors who represent it. Good manners require that we behave towards people not as we feel about them as individuals, but as their position or predicament in life dictates. The saving irresponsibility of Jane Austen is her freedom, as the prisoner of that society, to say what she likes about it. It is astonishing to the author that the prejudice should still linger that she is a constricting and censorious writer, a writer claustrophobically preoccupied with the right and the wrong thing. Although some of the most perceptive discussion of Jane Austen’s world has come from America, it may be that the American mind does have difficulty in taking for granted the reality of Jane Austen’s social units.