Jane Austen�s Limited Range:
Jane Austen as a novelist has stringently set her limits which she seldom oversteps. She was amazingly aware of which side her genius lay and she exploited it accordingly without any false notions of her capabilities or limitations. As Lord David Cecil points out, she very wisely stayed "within the range of her imaginative inspiration." Her imaginative inspiration was as severely limited as, for example, Hardy's or Arnold Bennett's. Her themes, her characters, her background setting -everything has a well-etched range within which she works, and works exquisitely. Jane Austen herself referred to her work as �Two inches of ivory.� In a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, Jane Austen wrote, �Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.� Although she works on a very small canvas, yet she has widened the scope of fiction in almost all its directions. Her stories are mostly indoor actions where only family matters are discussed. However, her...