place
for happiness; everybody is rich there." Her novels do not introduce us
to the most exalted levels of the aristocracy. They provide us, however,
with a natural history of county people and of people who are just below
the level of county people and live in the eager hope of being taken
notice of by them. There is more caste snobbishness, I think, in Jane
Austen's novels than in any other fiction of equal genius. She, far more
than Thackeray, is the novelist of snobs.

How far Jane Austen herself shared the social prejudices of her
characters it is not easy to say. Unquestionably, she satirized them. At
the same time, she imputes the sense of superior rank not only to her
butts, but to her heroes and heroines, as no other novelist has ever
done. Emma Woodhouse lamented the deficiency of this sense in Frank
Churchill. "His indifference to a confusion of rank," she thought,
"bordered too much on inelegance of mind." Mr. Darcy, again, even when
he melts so far as to become an avowed lover, neither forgets his social
position, nor omits to talk about it. "His sense of her inferiority, of
its being a degradation ... was dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due
to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend
his suit." On discovering, to his amazement, that Elizabeth is offended
rather than overwhelmed by his condescension, he defends himself warmly.
"Disguise of every sort," he declares, "is my abhorrence. Nor am I
ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you
expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To
congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is
so decidedly beneath my own?"

It is perfectly true that Darcy and Emma Woodhouse are the butts of Miss
Austen as well as being among her heroes and heroines. She mocks
them--Darcy especially--no less than she admires. She loves to let her
wit play about the egoism of social caste. She is quite merciless in
deriding, it when it becomes overbearing, as in Lady Catherine de
Bourgh, or when it produces flunkeyish reactions, as in Mr. Collins. But
I fancy she liked a modest measure of it. Most people do. Jane Austen,
in writing so much about the sense of family and position, chose as her
theme one of the most widespread passions of civilized human nature.

She was herself a clergyman's daughter. She was the seventh of a family
of eight, born in the parsonage at Steventon, in Hampshire