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 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