Jane Austen and the Moralists

Jane Austen is often described as just a miniature-painter. In Sense and Sensibility it is not only Elinor, Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood who exemplify equilibrium or else inequilibrium between judiciousness and feeling. Marianne and Elinor are alike in that their feelings are deep and genuine. The difference is that Marianne lets her joy, anxiety or grief so overwhelm her that she behaves like a person crazed. Jane Austen brings out the precise kinds of the sensibility exhibited by Elinor and Marianne by her wine-taster’s technique of matching them not only against one another, but also against nearly all the other characters in their little world. Jane Austen duly describes not only the major but also many of the minor characters in terms of their excellences and defects as brothers, aunts, daughters, cousins and parents. Jane Austen’s moral ideas are, with certain exceptions, ideas of the Aristotelian and not the Calvinist pattern.