Pattern in the novels of Jane Austen.

'Pattern' is here used to mean, not merely the 'structure' of Jane Austen's novels (that is, the artistic relationship of their parts to their wholes), but the total relationship of this artistic structure to the moral substance of the novels. The thesis is (as stated in the Introduction) that Jane Austen's powers of selection and arrangement serve a number of mutually consistent purposes: 'She carries out the novelist's obvious and elementary duties, to sustain interest in her stories and characters, and to render the events plausibly and the characters convincing; she manoeuvres her events and characters into an artistic form that has both proportion and inevitability; and she makes the form embody a moral assessment, first of her characters and their acts, and then, through them, of man's conduct in society.' In support of this thesis, Jane Austen's six completed novels are analysed in the following sequence: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. In the course of analysis, comparisons are made between the various novels in order to display 'a clear line of development', and to show the different ways in which, for different purposes, Jane Austen handles her material. The purpose of the dissertation is not to revalue her works, not to propose novel interpretations of their meaning, but 'to reveal more clearly the essential nature of known excellences'.