Is Jane Austen a Realist? 

Just discovered your channel and subscribed. Loving your Austen insights. Congratulations on your baby! 🎉

Congratulations on your baby daughter! And merry Christmas to you and your family.

Please adjust the recording volume. I have to turn it up 3x higher than normal, as high as my tv will go. I love your content. Congratulations on your daughter and have a holy advent and Christmas!

I can hardly hear this. I will listen with my headphones. Very interesting, thank you and congratulations on your daughter. Best wishes for Christmas.

I had this on my Watch Later list and somehow I lost track of this. This was a really enjoyable video!! Thank you.

I really appreciate this video and your Sub-stack essay. Your videos have given me a lot of insight about Austen and literature in general. I hope that you and your family have a very merry Christmas.

I've thought of Emma as an imaginative personality. She tries to form her world, of estate and village, according to an ideal. But struggles with the constants of her own and human nature, which prove not always conducive to fitting the ideal. Her initial reactions arent stellar, but as a good Burkean, she eventually adapts to change, not by rejecting prejudice (in Burke's positive understanding of that term, not the dirty word it's become in our era), but by recognizing prescriptive change. So, as an example, the young farmer, no longer a benighted usurper trying to capture the love of someone he isn't socially worthy of, becomes a respected yeoman who clearly has the status, and character, to pursue a wife, who isn't suitably fitted within the social hierarchy. The principles underlying Emma's ideal remain intact, but develop to meet changes that can be accommodated within the ideal. Austen, for me, is a stalwart of common sense. Merry Christmas! 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

🙏❤💜💓💓💓

Jane Austen was a realist in her style and methods of presenting her stories, but many of her novel's storylines (particularly in P&P and especially Persuasion) are romanticized to lesser or greater extent. Congratulations to your family on the advent of your daughter.

A comedy is a selected and skillfully-trimmed portion of the bigger whole we call reality, with the bad parts left out or suppressed. I'm guessing that because she (Jane) was the daughter of a clergyman she hoped (but did she believe??) that "all of this" (this mess of reality, with ALL lives ending in tragedy and death) will be straightened out, somehow, somewhere. Still, her observations about people and their behavior and motivation were firmly rooted in realism, not idealism. Your newfound wonder about this topic is hardly to be wondered at. My spouse was pretty much an atheist and a scientist until she gave birth; she is still a believer 34 years later.

Four points: First of all, congratulations on your baby! Beautiful! I'm amazed you're able to be clearly thinking and producing at this wonderful time of exhaustion and constant care of your new baby!! Second point: I think I agree with you substantially on almost everything about Austen, and it makes it very enjoyable to watch your videos. But it also means that I am all the more bothered when I see something incongruous in your thought. So I'd like to offer a correction of your description of the, "Comedy". In your video specifically about this topic, I thought you did a competent job of describing it as a movement from disorder to final order. Unfortunately, in this video, you said that it depicts the world, "as it SHOULD be". But I find this inexcusable--or at best, inaccurate--as a description from a believing intellegent Christian, such as yourself. The world we live in, ordered as it is by divine providence, doesn't fall short of a perfection which we mere creatures can imagine. Comedy doesn't show the world as it SHOULD be, but it shows it as it IS, in miniature. The world we live in DOES end in a grand and final glorious order, in which we will all rejoice. But since we don't see this order in our daily lives, because we don't yet live in the final end of all things, we use smaller works, like plays and novels, to give us a sense of what that final satisfaction will be like. I hope I'm not belaboring this nit-picky point, but I think it is important. What I'm saying is that the comedy is the most realistic form because it depicts more of reality as it is in itself even though it doesn't depict reality as we experience it in our daily lives. We don't yet experience the final satisfaction of the eschaton, but we labor under the disorder of a comedy not yet finished. The narrative of the Gospel gives us a sense of what that final happiness will be like because Christ dies in chaos but his rising gives us a satisfaction of final triumph in order and joy. But what I'm trying to emphasize here is that we are living, right now, in a comedy and we expect that all the loose ends and disorder of our crazy and painful lives will be one day seen in light of a final order which will satisfy us beyond all our pains. So comedies don't depict the world as it SHOULD be, but they are a mere image of what the world already is, and a foretaste of the satisfaction with which it will end. Third point: The second point was certainly nit-picky, but I agree with you on so much it only inclines me more to voice my disagreement with you on finer points. Fourth point: I love your Austen content, please keep it up!

you just do not understand what the literature of realism is. Back to school and don´t take our time