This book contains seven essays of literary criticism about Jane Austen – one for each of her completed novels, plus one for the Sanditon fragment. Duckworth’s thesis is that Austen uses “the estate” in her novels as “a metonym of an inherited culture endangered by forces from within and without” (p. 71). In other words, Austen’s estates (Mansfield Park, Pemberley, Donwell Abbey, etc.) are a metaphor for traditional social structures and morals, which are threatened in all the novels by dangerous “improvers” from the outside (most notably the Crawfords in Mansfield Park). Duckworth views Austen as a conservative author in the Burkean tradition, who believed in an objective morality founded on Christianity. He contends that Austen’s use of “estates” and “improvements” supports this claim about her worldview as a whole.

First of all, anyone who reads this book should be familiar with the plots of all Austen’s novels; Duckworth is a scholar writing to other scholars, and he clearly doesn’t care about “spoiling” the plots for anyone! Because of the academic orientation of this book, the writing style is pretty dry, and Duckworth also spends a lot of time referring to other scholars and discussing their interpretations of Austen’s work. That said, I found his arguments very interesting, and mostly quite persuasive. I particularly liked his interpretation of Mansfield Park, which he gives in the first chapter (although he discusses all the other novels in chronological order); it makes a lot of sense and makes Fanny Price a slightly more likeable character for me. This book isn’t intended for a general audience, but a diehard Austen fan or eighteenth-century scholar would probably find it interesting.