outlines of society were Austen's subject. Rather, aware of goings-on in the world (e.g., military exploits of Frederick Wentworth in England's Napoleonic wars in Persuasion or the peculiar and slightly unsavory colonial connection of Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility), she confined her stories to the world of her immediate experience, where she could portray the emotional and physical consequences of encounters between people with widely different histories in the meeting-places of genteel English society.
According to Allen (119), comedy was Austen's instrument of social criticism, and her literary forebears were the comic nov elists Richardson and Fielding (Allen 116). Even though Austen's literary project is one of social criticism and even satire, she is by no means engaged in undermining the very fabric of the society under scrutiny. She is, indeed, as socially conservative as any comic writer. Austen's comic resolutions turn on her heroines' emotionally successful prosecution of what Bush refers to as "the commercial view of marriage, however qualified by other considerations, [as] largely a matter of course" (Bush 5). Along the same lines, Hough says that in Austen, "the possibilities of new life are ordinarily represented by marriage" (389). This is even more forcefully argued by Nokes (passim), who suggests that the Austens as a family circle were by no means wealthy and had persistent financial worries.
The most persistently satisfying feature of Austen's work is her attention to thoughtful detail and strong, insightful observance of character faults and virtues in the context of a well-known social environment. In each novel, each succeeding the heroine makes her emotional and social way toward a happy mar riage. Along the way, Austen voices a convincing and compelling narrative and critique of social psychology, by careful observa tion of mores, manners, thoughts, and behavior. Though Austen's commitment to comic r...