A Need for Tenderness

Extract

It is sometimes felt that in her ironically sympathetic creation of Emma Woodhouse ‘whom no one but myself will much like’ Jane Austen deserves at least some of those strictures which see her books as damaged by the socially restrictive values of an upper middle-class point of view. It has been widely remarked that Miss Austen’s work suffers because of her cheerful acceptance of a class society, and, that, while it is true snobbery may be consistently ridiculed, her values and standards are, nevertheless, based on the assumption that social and economic inequality is a permanent characteristic of our imperfect world. As the twentieth century draws towards its close it seems that if this was Miss Austen’s opinion it is likely to be regarded as more intellectually respectable than has been the fashion for some time. In his sympathetic and perceptive essay on Emma Arnold Kettle argues that although the clarity of Jane Austen’s observation is matched by the precision of her social judgments — he sees her work as informed by ‘the delicate and unpretentious materialism of her outlook’ — there remains the important reservation that her vision is severely limited by her class background. Kettle asserts that although snobbery is held up to disdain Jane Austen’s characters never question the fundamental idea that ‘it is right and proper for a minority of the community to live at the expense of the majority’. He sees such criticism as justified not so much because Miss Austen failed to put forward a solution, but because she did not even notice the existence of a problem.