Reception history of Jane Austen a responsible land-owner taking care of his family's ancient estate and Emma Woodhouse symbolising wealth cut off from any sort of social role. David Kaufmann in his 1992 essay "Propriety and the Law" argued that Austen was a classical liberal in the mold of Adam Smith, who felt that virtue was best exercised in the private sphere of the family life rather than in the public sphere of politics. Kaufmann rejected the claim that Austen was influenced by Edmund Burke, arguing that for Austen, virtue was not something passed down from time immemorial from a landed elite as Burke would
Reception history of Jane Austen discourse allowed the reader to understand Emma mind without becoming limited by it. Another major theme of Austen scholarship has concerned the question of the "Bildungsroman" (novel of education). D.D Devlin in "Jane Austen and Education" (1975) argued that Austen's novels were all in varying ways "Bildungsroman", where Austen put into practice Enlightenment theories about how the character of young people can develop and change. The Italian literary critic Franco Moretti in his 1987 book "The Way of the World" called "Pride and Prejudice" a "classic" "Bildungsroman", where Elizabeth Bennet's "prejudice" against Mr. Darcy is really "distrust" and that "she