ABSTRACT
Austen encourages her readers to take virtuous characters as their role models and to recognize and avoid vice and folly. Literary critics and philosophers have related Jane Austen‘s understanding of morality to number of philosophers. Smith recommends ‘the virtues of sensibility and self-command’ as consisting in ‘the uncommon degrees of those qualities’; and Elinor, more than once in the novel as it unfolds, ‘shows extraordinary self-command. While greed and the disposition to break promises are widely known vices, character traits such as that of the ‘man of system’ and ‘impartial spectator’ are of specific Smithian design. May at least the readers of Adam Smith turn more attentively to Jane Austen’s novels as sources of lively illustrations and development of Smith’s ideas of the virtues as conductive to happiness and of the danger of misery arising from lack of virtue, and may many readers of Jane Austen turn to Smith as the novelist’s source of philosophical enlightenment on moral matters.
