The novelist Jane Austen is often associated with conservatism and her novels can be read as light entertainment depicting a vanished world and its manners. In Jane Austen and the Sate Mary Evans argues that far from endorsing established and conservative views Jane Austen advances a radical critique of the morality ob bourgeois capitalism and demonstrates a concern for the articulation of women’s rights and views whilst bringing out the vulnerability of women in the economic marketplace. What is more, such a critique is of as much relevance to us today as it was in the early nineteenth century.

 

Mary Evans adopts a multidisciplinary approach and her book will appeal to anyone who is interested in Jane Austen’s writing as well as to those concerned with the moral basis of contemporary politics.

Tavistock

London and New York, 1987

ISBN 0 422 61370 3