Reception history of Jane Austen their class, instead of their moral failures being presented as a product of the social system. Writing about the work of Johnson, Irvine wrote that for her, Austen was a radical because it is women like Emma Woodhouse, Mrs. Elton and Mrs. Churchill who really run Highbury society, undercutting traditional gender roles, but Irvine questioned whether this really made Austen into radical, noting it was the wealth and status of the gentry women of Highbury that gave them their power. Irvine argued it was just as possible to see "Emma" as a conservative novel that upholds the superiority of the
Reception history of Jane Austen the "engaging manner by which she masks society's crude coercive power", and uses irony in a "generosity of spirit". In his 1957 essay ""Emma" and the Legend of Jane Austen", Trilling argued that Austen was the first novelist to handle the very modern problem of the "deep psychological change which accompanied the establishment of democratic society" which imposed a "psychological burden" on an individual which the "new necessity of conscious self-definition and self-criticism", as "there is no reality about which the modern person is more uncertain and more anxious than the reality of himself". Trilling argued that in modern society,