ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Jane Austen's authorial personality with the aid of Horneyan psychology. Horneyan psychology can help to illuminate the author through his works because in the course of artistic creation the author's defensive strategies tend to express themselves in a variety of ways. A psychological analysis of Jane Austen's authorial personality will show how these diverse components of her nature are related to each other within a structure of inner conflicts. Jane Austen was fascinated with the cult of sensibility because, as a powerful literary and social phenomenon, it posed an important challenge to what she regarded as right values and the proper conduct of life. Jane Austen's most remarkable portrait of a ruthlessly aggressive person occurs not in the novels, but in an early work, "Lady Susan", whose heroine is a forerunner of Becky Sharp. Lady Susan fares in the end about as well, or as ill, as Jane Austen's other worldly characters.
