11
The association of Jane Austen and the state at first appears an unlikely one. Of all English novelists, Austen is generally assumed to be the most resistant to attempts by feminists, marxists, and sociologically minded literary critics to establish relationships between a literary work and a particular social formation. Whilst Austen’s near contemporaries, such as the Brontes and George Eliot, can be plundered successfully for information about the 1832 Reform Act, industrial unrest in the early days of the British factory system, or the conditions of work of Victorian governesses, Austen remains aloof from attempts to cull from her pages specific facts about social life and existent or emergent ideologies. As numerous critics have pointed out, we can search in vain in Austen for discussion of the great contextual events of her lifetime: the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars are virtually absent. What we find instead are those neat ladies and gentlemen (as Charlotte Bronte described them) who perambulate endlessly on well-cut lawns, involved in endless conversational games designed to ensure that the more eligible single people marry each other. Indeed, in some circles an admiration for Jane Austen’s work could be interpreted as identification with the views of Lord David Cecil and other Tory Janeites: a nostalgia for a golden age of the English gentry when elegant manners dictated and organized a coherent and ordered social world. To such enthusiasts Mrs Norris is merely ‘comic’ and the rescue from penury by marriage of Fanny Price and Jane Fairfax accords with romantic notions that deserving women should be recognized, courted, and married by good and honourable men.
The purpose of this essay is not, however, to challenge this extreme Janeite view of Jane Austen. As the author herself might have said, such a view scarcely requires rational opposition, and recent critics (for example Marilyn Butler (1975), Alistair Duckworth (1971), and Margaret Kirkham (1983)) have done much to demonstrate that Jane Austen was deeply involved in, and cognizant of, the major ideological debates of her time. But the crucial debate, I shall argue, with which she was concerned was the issue of morality, and in particular the question of how individuals should assess their personal responsibilities and inclinations in the light of their material circumstances. Thus the central thesis of this essay is that Jane Austen offers her readers a radical morality, and that far from endorsing the given, and emergent, values of late eighteenth-century capitalism she was in many ways deeply critical of them. The taken-for-granted association of Austen with conservatism – a position echoed even by those critics who have located Austen in a social context – misinterprets, I wish to suggest, two central themes of Austen’s fiction: her attempt to elucidate a morality that is independent of the material values of the capitalist market-place, and the claims that she articulates for the equality of men and women and the right of women to moral independence and autonomy. In the context of developments in the British state’s organization and regulation of morality in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Austen represents not a conservative but a liberal tradition: a tradition opposed to the equation of moral worth with wealth, and to the extension of patriarchal authority.
Morality is, of course, a crucial problem for any social system: how does a particular society ensure that its members behave in ways that are appropriate to its specific form of social life? Moreover, how are disputes between individuals, involving conflicts between their interests, decided in ways that guarantee social order, coherence, and continuity? All these problems are well known to anthropologists and sociologists, and are identified as central areas of concern. The resolution of disputes, and the elaboration of moral codes and rules of interpersonal behaviour, are part and parcel of the appropriate subject matter of social scientists; from this perspective, therefore, the novels of Jane Austen immediately become a rich and vital source of information about a particular social group. The ‘tribe’ – if we can call them that – of later eighteenth and early nineteenth-century gentry can be a source of endless fascination: encapsulated for ever in the pages of fiction they can be analysed with a thoroughness that is difficult to replicate in the case of real human subjects. But this attitude to Austen’s characters overlooks one crucial factor: this group of people are not inventions, neither did they live in a historical or social no person’s land. On the contrary, Austen’s characters lived at a crucial point in English history: the point at which a society which was already essentially capitalist was undergoing transformation into an industrial society – a society in which the accumulation of profit was to assume a new, and more comprehensive, ruthlessness. It was not, of course, that the agricultural magnates or merchants of the eighteenth century were against capital accumulation or uninterested in the rewards of wealth. This was demonstrably not the case. But the transformation of England into an industrial capitalist society involved the thorough integration of all aspects of social and material life into a form of order compatible with the demands of a society geared to the maximization of profit. As other social scientists have already pointed out, the period between 1780 and 1840 was a crucial locus in English history in terms of the increasing sophistication and comprehensiveness of attempts by the state to order and regulate the lives of its citizens. A largely rural world of agricultural production gave way – albeit slowly and only generally by the end of the nineteenth century – to an urban world of mechanized industrial production, a world in which people lived in concentrations of population and had to be controlled and organized in ways other than by the traditional community restraints of the countryside.
But Austen’s social world, it must be emphasized, is not one in which the coming of industrialization threatens rural calm and stability. First, rural calm and stability are ideological constructs of romantic historians: the history of the European countryside is crowded with conflicts between landowners and peasants, between different class groups, and between diverse cultures. Second, it was not industrialization which immediately threatened Austen’s social world but the increasing commercialization of agriculture and the resources of the land in the eighteenth century. In a major and important essay on the social location of Austen’s world Terry Lovell (1978) has pointed out that Austen herself belonged to the lesser gentry, a social group whose prosperity was increasingly threatened as the rise of capitalism in the countryside proceeded along its unimpeded path. As Lovell writes:
‘Different sections of the gentry class were able to adapt to their new social role with varying degrees of ease or hardship. Squeezed between the rising capitalist tenant-farmer and the upper gentry, whose estates had been consolidated and increased in size at their expense, the lesser gentry, to which Jane Austen’s family belonged, was in a more exposed position. A position from which the perception of a general threat to their class might be perceived, from which the social and ideological differences between traditional rural society and the new urban capitalist order would appear very great.’
(Lovell 1978: 21)
Austen, Lovell argues, is thus not writing from a position of security. On the contrary, she is writing from a position of insecurity, in which her own situation could easily become that of Miss Bates in Emma and in which it was easy to understand the restrictions imposed by a limited and unreliable income. The Janeite view of Jane Austen overlooks, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, the material problems of many of Austen’s characters, and indeed of Austen herself. Equally, those critics who have attempted to rescue Austen from her over-genteel enthusiasts have in their own way given a false emphasis to her novels – that of supposing that Austen is first and foremost an ideological writer, in the sense of being exclusively concerned with questions of individual morality or personal behaviour. D.W. Harding, in his famous essay ‘Regulated Hatred: an Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen’ (1963), offers an almost Laingian analysis of Austen’s portrayal of family relationships – an analysis which is acute and perceptive in its revelation of the intensity of feeling in Austen, but which nevertheless fails to locate a major source of those deeply felt passions, namely, the desire to maintain and, if possible, improve an increasingly precarious position in the social world. To call this materialism might suggest an interpretation which is solely and simply about income: on the contrary, I would argue that Austen’s materialism is far more sophisticated than this. Of course she can see as clearly as any intelligent observer of the social world that income is necessary to maintain life, and a certain level of income is essential to maintain a way of life that allows for the employment of servants and reasonably acceptable accommodation. But more than this, she realizes that income maintains not just the material world but also the social world: without that sufficient income there is no access to social networks, to assembly, to literature, to even limited mobility. The very fabric of daily life, of food, of dress, of light and heat, is thus implied and considered by Jane Austen: she can not only locate as clearly as any capitalist the extent of an individual’s income, but can also see beyond the bare facts of cash in the hand to what income, or its lack, can make of life. When Mr Knightley, in Emma, challenges Emma’s treatment of Miss Bates, Jane Austen makes him remark that she ‘is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more!’1 Lack of income here is given a reality and a human perception that could not be described simply in terms of lack of money. ‘She has sunk from the comforts she was born to’ suggests precisely the decline in fortune of Miss Bates: the loss, in adulthood and early old age, of any expectation of easy sufficiency and the constant threat not merely of financial stringency but of actual material hardship.
So far from a position of security, and an experience of little except ease and prosperity, the actual experience of Jane Austen, and many of her characters, is that of possible material hardship and constraint. The mythologizers of her world have perceived only Mr Darcy, Mr Knightley, and Emma Woodhouse: the other, more numerous, characters – the Dashwoods, the Bennets, Fanny Price and the entire Price family, the family of Sir Walter Elliot, and Miss Bates and her mother – are all people who live if not actually in poverty, in the sense that it was experienced by sections of the eighteenth-century peasantry or urban poor, then at least uncomfortably close to the possibility of becoming poor and consequently far removed from bourgeois society. There are admittedly very real differences in the degree of possible hardship to be faced by Miss Bates and Sir Walter Elliot: Miss Bates could end her life in abject poverty in one room, whilst Sir Walter faces exile from his ancestral home, but still a reasonably prosperous future in furnished rooms. But the essential similarity uniting these characters is that both live a life that is far from absolutely secure; there has to be, for each character in her or his different way, a daily calculation of the means of maintaining ordinary life. Sir Walter, as Jane Austen points out more than once, has brought insecurity and the threat of insolvency upon himself through his extravagance and profligacy, and is almost too arrogant to realize that he might become poor. Nevertheless, his relationships with others become coloured by the decline in his fortunes: Captain Wentworth, once an unacceptable son-in-law, becomes at least tolerable when the possessor of a large capital sum.
An examination of many of the other characters of Jane Austen’s novels would demonstrate the same possible insecurities as those faced by Sir Walter Elliot or Miss Bates. Thus her novels might be read as a form of suspense drama: what would happen to Anne Elliot, to Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, to Fanny Price, and the Dashwood sisters if suitable, and in most cases either wealthy or comfortably off, husbands had not appeared on the scene? Anne Elliot had nothing, her livelihood depended on an idle and spendthrift father; equally, the Bennet and the Dashwood sisters had little or no provision for their maintenance. Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is generally regarded as one of the more absurd and comic figures of English fiction, and her preoccupation with marrying off her daughters as the mania of a somewhat inadequate intelligence. But in view of the economic exigencies facing the unmarried daughters of the eighteenth-century gentry, Mrs Bennet’s concerns do not seem entirely ridiculous. Indeed, her obsessive concern with marriage and her ceaseless – and quite ruthless – pursuit of young men to marry her daughters are arguably instances of greater parental responsibility than the sardonic lack of interest of Mr Bennet, to whom the activities of his wife are nothing but an irritation. If Mrs Bennet is slightly crazy, then perhaps she is so because she perceives, more clearly than her husband, the possible fate of her daughters if they do not marry. Mr Bennet, by far the more attractive character on a first (or even a second) reading of the novel, could then be interpreted as an irresponsible patriarch: a man with so little real interest in the fate of his daughters that he is content to allow his wife to bear the brunt of anxiety about their future. Given that she has five daughters, it is little wonder that at times Mrs Bennet is less than rational.
So the apparent ease and comfort of Jane Austen’s world can be rapidly revealed as one of limited and unreliable security. Capitalism, as much in the eighteenth as in the twentieth century, is not a stable social system: its perpetual crises and problematic continuation condemn those who live within it to endless concern about the maintenance of material life. As if to emphasize this point, Jane Austen herself provides, in all the novels, minor characters, who often play little part in the central narrative and yet stand as embodiments of the fate of women handicapped by poverty or social stigma. Outside the cultivated and elegant gardens, the splendid drawing rooms, therefore, are the shades of real hardship. Thus in Mansfield Park we find the Price family living in squalor in Portsmouth, in Persuasion Anne Elliot’s friend Mrs Smith living in cramped poverty, Colonel Brandon’s ruined sister-in-law Eliza eking out her days in what is described as a ‘spunging’ house, and of course Miss Bates and her mother in Emma confined to their small flat and dependent on Mr Knightley and Emma for minimal comforts. If women do not marry and do not live by the moral code of bourgeois society then their fate is unlikely to be prosperous or happy.
Whether or not this account of the lives of women in the late eighteenth century replicates actual social reality is a point which it would be difficult to establish with absolute certainty. But what we can deduce from historical record is that with very few exceptions (Emma Woodhouse being one) women in eighteenth-century England – be they members of the gentry, the urban middle class, or the rural poor – needed to marry in order to guarantee for themselves economic support. Women who belonged to the gentry or the aristocracy were certainly provided with capital sums (and Austen documents very clearly the capital sums owned by her heroines) but with one exception these were small sums and largely insufficient to maintain a household. So women could, and did, have incomes, but for accommodation and the expenses of running their household they were largely dependent on men: initially their fathers and subsequently, it was to be hoped, their husbands. Paid employment did not exist for middle-class women: in Emma Jane Fairfax nearly becomes a governess, but that is the only professional option mentioned by Austen. We can now show that it was far from being the single profession open to eighteenth-century women; but the forms of paid employment available to middle-class women were nevertheless limited and the question voiced to women in many households, in all classes and to this day, of ‘who do you think is going to keep you?’ was clearly a dominating concern of women of Jane Austen’s class and social milieu.
That the question of potential responsibility for material provision for women is still voiced today is a demonstration of the consistency and resilience of a pattern of relationships between the sexes over a period of some hundred years. The pattern is that of female dependence on male provision – the expectation that men will provide the material conditions of life for women. This expectation has persisted despite the development of an industrial society, universal education, the accessibility of contraception, the extension of civil liberties to women, and the other numerous changes that have altered the lives of men and women in the last 200 years. Yet what has not changed is the different access that the sexes have to public power and public life: a contemporary Captain Wentworth might still make his fortune with greater ease than a contemporary Anne Elliot, and it is still left to men to manage the affairs of women. Nevertheless, it is as much the case today as it was in the time of Jane Austen that women exercise power over matters that affect individuals, and individual households. Moreover, they do this, in the 1980s as much as in the late eighteenth century, in the general context of capitalist social relations. And the social relationships of capital unite the sexes as much then as now; whatever the marital conflicts of Mr and Mrs John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility it is apparent that interest in their property will forge a link impervious to any divisions of gender. Indeed, far from acting as a sister to her husband’s sister-in-law, Mrs John Dashwood behaves towards her with the cold-blooded ruthlessness of a determined and callous entrepreneur. The needs of capital, in this instance, take precedence over any consideration of personal concern or moral responsibility.
We have then in Austen’s work a picture of a world in which the majority of characters are constrained, to a greater or lesser extent, by material necessity, and in which the assessment of material need is acted out against the background of a society in which material ruin is a possibility. Within this context it is generally the case, then as now, that women have less power than men over their immediate material conditions and general political circumstances. Women did not, in the late eighteenth century, any more than they do today, exercise political or material power that was equal or equivalent to that of men. The question of how women are to act, how they are to maintain their interests, consequently becomes crucial to any author with more than a passing interest in relationships between the sexes. Indeed, an examination of the eighteenth-century novel suggests that just as much as Austen – and later, Eliot and the Brontes – male authors were much exercised with the question of the development of a viable morality of sexual relationships. Terry Eagleton (1982) has, for example, persuasively argued that Richardson’s Clarissa is an extended discussion of the possibilities of female resistance to the demands of an assertive, aggressive patriarchal culture that is increasingly regarded as entirely legitimate. Clarissa’s resistance to Lovelace, her demonstration that the values of Lovelace and her own relatives are highly questionable, indicate a deep suspicion of both bourgeois self-interest and aristocratic sexual codes. Eagleton writes:
‘Clarissa superbly “totalizes” the sexual and the social, conscious of what we might today call the “relative autonomy” of sexual oppression while materialist enough to discern its economic basis. Sexuality, far from being some displacement of class conflict, is the very medium in which it is conducted.’
(Eagleton 1982: 88)
The complexities of the relationships between the characters in Clarissa are such that it is impossible to distinguish characters who act simply in terms of their class or their gender interests. Certainly what Richardson is able to show is that no one solution exists to the dilemmas that confront Clarissa and Lovelace. If Clarissa agrees to Lovelace’s demands, she then compromises her sense of self and her autonomy: patriarchy, or the code of sexual relationships as construed by Lovelace, offers women no opportunity for the development of their own perception of sexuality and its place in human relationships. If, on the other hand, she rejects Lovelace in the terms of the bourgeois morality of the Harlowes, then she does so in terms that are, to her, deeply morally suspect in that they make social convenience and self-interest into morality. The Harlowes’ morality, or their moral advice to women, is that of the market – the guide to behaviour that suggests that women should never enter heterosexual relationships unless some bargain has been struck that offers material protection. This form of moral advice contains, of course, an element of real protection for women and as such is a code that is not without its positive side even outside the context of bourgeois self-interest, for it offers women the understanding that the children who may result from sexual relationships will be recognized by their fathers and entitled to their protection and support. But this ancient and generally agreed morality, which provided a pattern for the organization of sexual relations throughout Europe for centuries, is only part of the code of the late eighteenth-century bourgeoisie – and it is fundamentally different in one respect, for what is at stake is less the protection of women and children than of property and status.
So we cannot identify the bourgeois morality of the Harlowes as positive, or say that it is superior to that of Lovelace. The codes are different but neither is acceptable to those concerned (as Clarissa is) with an ethically viable morality. And all that Richardson can offer as a way out of the moral, and indeed personal, impasse in which Clarissa finds herself, is death – a slow, masochistic death in which her hatred of the many forces that oppose her is turned into a self-destroying depression that eventually saps her vitality and her will to live. Quite what else Clarissa could have done in her situation is an interesting question for speculation: in other novels in which heroines have been faced with equally appalling choices they have taken equally radical actions (a flight, like Jane Eyre’s, in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, more or less literally across the heather or a deliberate flouting of convention by satirizing – as did Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights – the expectations of Victorian society about romance and marriage) or else have failed – like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – to transcend the limits of their situation and live outside bourgeois convention. Anna’s suicide, like Clarissa’s death, is both an act of a tortured individual and an act against the society which has created the miseries that the individual has endured. Clarissa’s death destroys Lovelace as much as Anna’s destroys Vronsky: these dramatic situations, in which strong passions and strong wills are irreconcilably opposed, represent the conflicts that result in societies, and more particularly in classes within societies, where moral codes are contradictory and inconsistent.
But the morality of sexuality occupies a crucial place in the concerns of a society which values social order and coherence. It is unlikely that the specific dilemma of Clarissa was widely replicated in late eighteenth-century England, but nevertheless Richardson’s dramatization of the conflict between Lovelace and Clarissa does represent an extremely important conflict between two groups within the English ruling class. To quote Eagleton again:
‘the tragedy of Clarissa … dramatises a collision between two wings of the eighteenth century ruling class whose true destiny lay not in conflict but in alliance. In ideological terms, however, the tragedy is indeed of “world historical” proportions, a key phase of English class history. Lovelace is a reactionary throwback, an old-style libertine or Restoration relic who resists a proper “embourgeoisement”; the future of the English aristocracy lies not with him but with the impeccably middle-class Sir Charles Grandison.’
(Eagleton 1982: 89)
Not of course, that by the beginning of the nineteenth century every aristocrat had been transformed into a model of bourgeois propriety, or even that every aristocrat had behaved like Lovelace in the eighteenth century. What is at stake here is not the literal correspondence of fictional behaviour with the behaviour of real people, but the credence and viability given to different moralities at different times. The question of ‘how to live’ is therefore not one that is ‘solved’ by either Richardson or Austen, but is an enduring question which is given different answers as circumstances and situations change.
Between Richardson and Austen there lies, however, the very significant difference that whilst Richardson’s major heroine dies a death of slow misery, Austen leaves her heroines at the end of her novels in positions of unassailable virtue – and generally much enhanced social and material circumstances. Since Austen is as aware as Richardson that there are problems to be raised and questions asked about the appropriate nature of sexual morality, we might conclude that she develops some better answers to the question. Yet such a reading would ignore the differences between Austen and Richardson in their conceptualization of the problems involved: Richardson presents us with dichotomous groups and polarizes the two central characters in Clarissa in terms of their values and interests. Men and women – represented by Lovelace and Clarissa – thus stand as two separate groups and between them there is, Richardson suggests, a conflict that is as old as human history. Austen, on the other hand, juxtaposes not men and women, but types of human beings: to use the titles of her own novels, the proud and the prejudiced, the sensible and the oversensible. Gender therefore becomes secondary to the nature of a human being’s personal qualities: the battle is less for control of sexual access than for the terms in which sexual access is agreed.
This battle was – and is – a crucial one for both men and women and for social order. As suggested above, a moral code has existed within western European peasant communities for centuries about the proper conduct of sexual relationships: pre-marital heterosexual relationships were not barred (although frequently not condoned either) but the community did expect men to acknowledge and support the children resulting from such relationships. Pre-marital chastity, for both men and women, was therefore less of an issue for agricultural workers or landless labourers than it was for the middle class, the gentry, and the aristocracy. At stake of course are different priorities; for the poor the major concern is that children be provided for, and that women will be assured of material support. For the propertied classes, the major concern is that property should be passed from one generation to the next: ensuring legitimate heirs, and the clear identity of the father, are thus of importance. In these classes, therefore, sexual relationships have to be carefully organized so that rights to property are clearly defined.
Yet sexual relationships and marriage are not, for any class or group in any historical period, solely about material concerns. Also involved are the individual’s expectations about sexual and emotional life and the nature of the obligations that individuals enter into when they marry. The Church of England – in much the same way as the Roman Catholic Church – makes no secret of its views when it places ‘mutual help and support’ of husband and wife in third place on the list of duties involved in marriage. The text of the Anglican marriage service, written at a time when the association of heterosexual intercourse with reproduction was difficult to escape, made it quite clear that the protection (and the birth) of children was the church’s major priority. If we read ‘children’ as a metaphor for fertility, or for procreation, we then see that the church is advocating, indeed supporting, the control and regulation of human fertility in a particular way which has become the accepted pattern of British society. This involves the legal marriage of a man and a woman and the absolute, and as yet unbroken, responsibility of the husband to support his wife and children. Nor do responsibilities solely fall on husbands: the wife, the marriage service makes clear, is expected to ‘obey’ her husband; authority within marriage is clearly located in men.
From historical record and biography, it is possible to deduce that the expectations of the church about people’s behaviour within marriage were disappointed as often in the eighteenth century as they are in the twentieth: husbands and wives did not honour, love, or support one another, nor did they necessarily forsake all others. So the reality of behaviour in these areas was often far from the ideal. Equally, it was frequently the case that husbands did not support their families: women and children were deserted and left penniless, and surviving accounts of family and domestic life suggest that the ‘problems’ of the family are no invention of the latter part of the twentieth century. All such possibilities were inevitably known to Jane Austen, whose family and friendship network was both extensive and varied. Indeed, she saw in her lifetime an outstanding example of the complete rejection of conventional expectations of morality in the Prince Regent’s behaviour to his wife. Not only did the Prince Regent flout bourgeois conventions about monogamous marriage, he also flouted aristocratic convention in the open and deliberate presentation of his mistress in the place of his wife. As Edward VIII was to discover some hundred years later, London aristocratic society could tolerate adultery and extramarital relationships of considerable length and commitment, but it could not tolerate notoriety, publicity, lack of discretion, or attempts by individuals to translate relationships established outside marriage into relationships that would be those of marriage.
What these two particular instances suggest is that the organization of sexuality and sexual relations is both a problem for bourgeois society in the literal sense – that of any society’s need to maintain the organization of fertility and reproduction – and in the more complex sense of the need of bourgeois society to organize the moral categories of its citizens. This concern pays little attention to the quality of the order that is maintained: what is at stake is the maintenance of viable categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Thus, for example, in the case of the relationships of the Prince Regent and Edward VIII with women to whom they were not married, the issue was not only one of social order, but also of the kind of behaviour that an individual could legitimately adopt in order to ensure his or her happiness. In both cases, numerous individuals and institutions were much exercised at the behavour of the individuals involved; in both cases the individuals apparently endorsed the belief that people have a right to the pursuit of happiness.
The naïvety, in both the social and the moral sense, of this belief is one of the chief targets of Austen’s fiction. She demonstrates, in all her novels, that individuals are very often poor judges of what will make them happy, and that the individual pursuit of happiness and of perceived needs will frequently bring unhappiness on innocent others. But her moral sense is not one of prohibition. Unlike some later Victorian (and Edwardian and twentieth-century) moralists Austen does not stand in the tradition of either condemnation and prohibition or of bourgeois moral rigidity. She is not, therefore, a friend to the morality of the Harlowes, nor, we can assume, a supporter of the kind of bourgeois morality which, in Victorian Britain, was responsible for the Contagious Diseases Act and the stigmatization of illegitimate children and their mothers. From a background of relative security and social assurance, Austen suggests to us that morality is not to be enforced; it has to be taught, and learned. Moreover, a moral act and a moral decision cannot be motivated by inclination, or by what are described in the twentieth century as ‘feelings’. ‘Feelings’, as Jane Austen was well aware, are far from adequate as a guide to human action. The morality of Austen’s work is one that is, I hope to show, not only radical in its assumptions about the moral equality of the sexes, but also, and perhaps more importantly, radical in so far as she suggests that the social relationships of bourgeois society are empty and meaningless if they are devoid of moral principle and concern. That Austen does not question capitalism or heterosexuality must be acknowledged – what she does is to make for both patterns of social organization moral systems that have an internal coherence and ethical viability. To say that she defends capitalism and heterosexuality is thus far from accurate; capitalism and heterosexuality as we know them are social systems that have been fashioned in ways which Austen would have regarded as unacceptable. For example, although Austen is not a critic of material gain, she is a fierce critic of material greed and ruthlessness. The unacceptable face of capitalism appears more than once in her novels: she is clearly against the exploitative entrepreneur, and suggests that the pursuit of profit must be tempered by moral concern and values other than those of the profit motive. So we are faced with an intriguing problem: is Austen suggesting that a morality of personal relationships can be developed, within the context of capitalist social relationships, that is independent of the material relationships of that society? If so, does it then follow that what she develops is a morality appropriate for all classes, and both sexes, within capitalism? The following pages explore these issues.