There are those that argue that literature exceeds reality, making real life something that it is not, usually something nicer than it really is. Eva Brann argues that Jane Austen is able to transcend this issue. In her novels she is able to present real life in a fictional landscape:
In the Republic, Socrates speaks of "a certain ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry," in which philosophy can be said to charge fiction makers with a double crime: first the shameless fabrication of images which insidiously obstruct the search for being, and then the reckless vivification of these shades by means of a lurid singularity -- so that the more brilliant the fiction, the greater the blame. Jane Austen sidesteps the first charge by being so candidly imitative and yet so careful to refrain from touching the last things as to offer not the least impediment to philosophy, while she meets the second by conforming all her fictions to a serenely normal pattern - she never even invents an authoress. The wonder is that figures so carefully middling in stature are nonetheless so absorbing: Sir Walter Scott caught the essence of her excellence when he observed that she "renders ordinary, commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment."
But if Jane Austen's prosaic poetry is neither false nor egregious and her six novels give delight and hurt not, then that "ancient quarrel" is here for once composed, and these fictions, at least, can be loved rationally.
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Brann, Eva. "The Perfections of Jane Austen." 1979
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