ABSTRACT
Jane Austen is a great comic artist, a serious interpreter of life, and a creator of brilliant mimetic characterizations. Some critics feel that she achieves, better perhaps than any other novelist, a balance between these various components of her art. There are powerful unrecognized tensions between form, theme, and mimesis in most of Austen's novels. These tensions are not the result of a particular weakness on her part, for they exist in almost all realistic novels and are a characteristic of the genre. Structurally, her novels are a series of variations upon the basic "comic movement from threatening complications to a happy ending". The fact that she is writing comedy does not interfere with Jane Austen's thematic concerns. She harmonizes form and theme by moralizing the comic action. Mimetic characterization is one of Jane Austen's most brilliant but least recognized achievements. Austen's moral conservatism tends to diminish some of her comic effects.
