Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume

With their timeless observations of human nature, the novels of Jane Austen continue to resonate with modern readers. Austen's accessibility to diverse audiences in divergent periods is due at least in part to her moral perspicacity. In this thought-provoking study, E.M. Dadlez argues that perspectives on value and ethical reasoning expressed in Austen's work converge with views concerning human nature and morality put forward by David Hume. Dadlez maintains that Austen's novels provide us both with thought experiments and outright illustrations that support or demonstrate particular points which Hume himself made about moral reasoning, and about aesthetic and epistemic norms. If so, we can claim for Hume’s ethics, and for some of his philosophy of mind and epistemology and aesthetics as well, the same universality and breadth of accessibility that is ascribed to Austen. And while Austen can sometimes help us to understand and to expand upon Hume, it is also the case that Hume can help us to understand and to expand upon Austen, by making salient features of her texts that are too often neglected.