Sense and sensibility and Mansfield Park : inner worlds and modernity.

Abstract

In her book In The Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction, Susan Morgan argues that in Austen “the proper use of imagination is continuous, a creative process of perception and judgment” (Duckworth 97). In his review of Morgan’s work, Alistair Duckworth notes that Morgan’s readings of Austen’s work “offer the alternative of a more modern author who […] creates characters who respond imaginatively to events unfolding in time” (Duckworth 97). By “stressing the fluidity of mental processes” in a character then, Austen can thus be seen as “a novelist opposed to dogmatic truths, committed to the particulars of experience, and open to future possibilities in a mood of optimistic skepticism” (Duckworth 97). Any attempt to identify the more modern aspects of Austen’s work hence merits a study of character thought processes which reveal the use of the imagination and judgment.