Abstract Jane Austen comments often in her novels on the system of education for young women in polite artistic accomplishments. Twentieth-century Austen scholars aligned their discussions of those comments with the moralistic opinion of her day, which largely opposed that system. They tended to assume that Austen’s attitude was similarly negative. But her treatment of female accomplishment was much more complex than that of the conduct book writers. It corresponds revealingly with psychological themes in the contemporary late-Enlightenment ‘Science of Man’. This article traces an argument that develops across the six novels about her female characters and the polite arts. Austen proposes that the system in which they are educated is morally ambiguous, and that the accomplishments are over-determined as a topic of theory and conversation, but that they provide insights into the cognitive style of those trained in them, and into the nature of intelligence more generally. For Austen this line of thinking had broad implications: it was relevant to her idea of what it is to live everyday life with skill and wit; it also connected out to her views on handicraft, political economy and useful knowledge.
Paddy Bullard (Tue,) studied this question.