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Palgrave Macmillan

Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues

  • Book
  • © 2005

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Authors:
  1. Sarah Emsley
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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Introduction How Should I Live My Life?

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 1-16

  3. The Virtues According to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Austen

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 17-41

  4. Propriety’s Claims on Prudence in Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 42-56

  5. Sense and Sensibility: “Know Your Own Happiness”

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 57-82

  6. Pride and Prejudice and the Beauty of Justice

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 83-106

  7. Fanny Price and the Contemplative Life

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 107-128

  8. Learning the Art of Charity in Emma

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 129-144

  9. Balancing the Virtues in Persuasion

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 145-158

  10. Conclusion: After Austen

    • Sarah Emsley
    Pages 159-168

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 169-202
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About this book

This book examines Austen's novels in relation to her philosophical and religious context, demonstrating that the combination of the classical and theological traditions of the virtues is central to her work. Austen's heroines learn to confront the fundamental ethical question of how to live their lives. Instead of defining virtue only in the narrow sense of female sexual virtue, Austen opens up questions about a plurality of virtues. In fresh readings of the six completed novels, plus Lady Susan, Emsley shows how Austen's complex imaginative representations of the tensions among the virtues engage with and expand on classical and Christian ethical thought.

About the author

SARAH EMSLEY teaches in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University, USA. She received her Ph.D. from Dalhousie University and spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, UK.

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