Such critical discussion has placed Jane Austen's stance toward the intellectual fashions and social changes of her time, and shown how moral assessments of characters are established through the ideas they express. Assuming the validity and usefulness of that work, I propose to
read the talk of Austen's narrators and characters more completely in terms of the ways they are both qualified and deepened by their dramatic situations. This procedure brings to light the full self-consciousness of Austen's sense of language and metaphor, as well as a striking development in her willingness to rely on metaphor to imply inner, non-social resources of character.