Jane Austen, by contrast, identifies that social sphere within which the practice of the virtues is able to continue. It is not of course that she is blind to the economic realities against which Cobbett railed. We learn somewhere in all her novels about where the money of the main characters comes from; we see a great deal of the economic self-seeking, of the pleonexia which is central to Cobbett’s vision. So much so indeed that David Daiches once described her as a ‘Marxist before Marx’. Her heroines must, if they are to survive, seek for economic security. But this is not just because of
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