‘A Developement of Self: Character and Personality in Jane Austen’s Fiction

Abstract

Reviewing a recent work of fantasy and science fiction, Joyce Carol Oates declared that the world of science fiction ‘is far more credible than that of Jane Austen’¹ The comparison is cleverly framed to shock the reader, to challenge his scale of literary values, since of all English and American novelists Jane Austen is perhaps the most secure in her reputation as a writer who delivers a compact and credible fictional world, orderly and sufficient within itself yet tangential at every point to our own disordered lives. In spite of her distance from us in time and experience, and her austere decision to make her fictional world far more limited than her actual observation, most of us are content to live within the created world of Jane Austen’s novels. This sense of completeness surely has much to do with the way in which she invents, establishes, and develops the characters in her fiction. I would like to speculate in this essay about Jane Austen’s authority in characterisation, and perhaps the best place to begin is with some thoughts about the coherence and apparent inevitability of her created world.