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 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