Austen's Classicism (2)

Just a quick addendum to note that I deliberately chose to write classicism and not neo-classicism. I agree with MacIntyre that Austen is part of a continuous tradition of ethical thinking that might be called Aristotelian. There is nothing "neo" about it.

I'll say something about that in terms of Elinor's character very soon (although nothing that I haven't more or less already said.)

Update: I won't be getting to Elinor quite so soon as I plan to go through Northanger Abbey first

Austen's Classicism

I've just finished rereading Sense and Sensibility and I'm more convinced than ever of Austen's classicism and of Elinor's greatness. She is the towering heroine of the Austen books.

I'm also struck at how very, very different the books are from one another.

I heard an academic speaking of Austen the other day and, as academics so often seem to do, he was praising her but in a way that was clearly calculated to diminish her. He said she had written some of the greatest love stories written in English prose. But she didn't. I don't think Austen thought much of love stories. I think she thought love a rather easy thing to do, a little too easy.

No, what she wrote were great marriage stories. (Update: looking around at Austen criticism, I see, not surprisingly, that a number of critics beat me to this by decades, which is kind of reassuring, apparently I'm not crazy.)

But not so much in Sense and Sensibility as in the later books. This is a book about sisters as much as it is about the marriages they end up in.

Update: My project now is to go back and reread all six books blogging all the way. The first big question is what is sensibility and what does Austen really think of it. It's commonplace to say she is attacking sentimental novels and romanticism but I'm not so sure.