Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery

In this thoughtful appraisal of the novels and writings of Jane Austen, Mr. Mudrick shows her to be a writer of acute and irreverent sensibilities who, despite the constricted circumstances of her life, managed to create in her novels an enduring microcosm of the larger world. With deep insight into the creative mind and its artistic motives, Mr. Mudrick examines all of her writings as aspects of a developing personal irony, an irony that later became the vital principle of her art. It was her ironic detachment, he maintains, that enabled her to expose and dissect, in novels that are masterpieces of comic wit and brilliant satire, the follies and delusions of eighteenth-century English society.