How far would you defend Austen’s fiction, and on what grounds, against one of the following objections?
a) “Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores” (Charlotte Brontë).

b) “[V]ulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow” (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

c) “It makes me most uncomfortable to see | An English spinster of the middle-class | Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’, | Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety | The economic basis of society” (W. H. Auden).

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