Shannon Chamberlain on Adam Smith, Jane Austen, and Eighteenth Century Novels

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The Economics of Jane Austen
Adam Smith and The Romance Novel

from "The Economics of Jane Austen"

But if any Smith book was likely to have sat on an Austenian side table, it wasn’t The Wealth of Nations, but the work that Smith himself considered foundational, and thus revised a staggering six times over the course of his lifetime, up until the year of his death. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) introduced Smith’s concept of sympathy. This was a word used slightly differently in Smith’s time than in our own. . . It referred instead to the mortar of civilized society, the way that we modify our behavior as we come to an understanding of how others see us and realize that they cannot regard our problems in the same close and passionate way that we do.

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And it is this argument about the relationship between wealth and virtue—the regrettable way that we seek what we already had to begin with, to our great mental and moral harm—that manifests itself particularly in Sense and Sensibility.

from "Adam Smith and the Romance Novel"

But there’s a related, tantalizing possibility: that Smith’s ideas about the compatibility of wealth and virtue were influenced by Austen’s predecessors in the novel—that the fiction of his times shaped his view of subjects like the interaction between the classes, sexual morals, and the economics of inheritance.

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But in the 1740s, long fictional prose narratives that had previously concerned themselves with aristocrats became … a little less about aristocrats. Starting with Daniel Defoe and really taking off with Samuel Richardson, novels centered on the conflict between politically connected aristocrats and the members of the classes below them.

In Richardson’s extraordinary popular debut, Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, a ladies’ maid resists the seductions of her boss so effectively that he marries her. Things take a more tragic turn for the eponymous heroine of Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, a woman of the Austenesque gentry class who has the misfortune to run into a degenerate lordling who will feel very bad about himself after he rapes her and drives her to one of those shockingly common stress deaths of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Sources: 
Shannon Chamberlain, The Economics of Jane Austen,  The Atlantic, August 3, 2014

Shannon Chamberlain, Adam Smith and the Romance Novel,  The Atlantic, September 3, 2014