ABSTRACT
Jane Austen's prose is often described as abstract in its style, and by modern standards it is very noticeably so. It is not only that abstract nouns and related adjectives are very common in Jane Austen, which they are, but also that Austen uses abstractions where a modern writer would be much more concrete. In discussing the characteristic of abstraction in Austen's writing, Page puts a passage from Persuasion next to a passage from Sons and Lovers, to illustrate the very great difference between prose which rests on abstraction and prose which depends on the concrete. Page, entirely rightly, is not concerned to decide which of Austen or Lawrence is better: in any case, it is not just a question of individual styles, but a question of historical distances and processes, that is in play in the differences between Persuasion and Sons and Lovers.
