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 Wayne Booth's 1961 book "The Rhetoric of Fiction", in which he offered a detailed study of "Emma", which he argued was told from three points of view; Emma's, Mr. Knightley's and the unnamed narrator. Booth argued that Austen adopted this three-fold narration because Emma is in many ways an unlikable character, a spoiled and immature busybody, and Austen had to find a way to make her likable and engaging to the reader. Booth's book was widely praised for the way in which he highlighted how a moral problem (Emma's character) was turned into an aesthetic problem (how to tell the