'Myself creating what I saw ': sympathy and solipsism in Jane Austen's Emma

Abstract

This paper situates Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) in relation to Enlightenment ideas about selfhood. It argues that the moral philosophy of two central figures from the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith, may be used to shed light on Austen’s dramatisation of the self’s interaction with others, especially in Emma. Of particular importance is the emphasis on ‘sympathy’ in the work of Hume and Smith. The genuinely ‘sympathetic’ self gains self-knowledge and self-insight through responsiveness to the perspectives and predicaments of others. This is in stark contrast to solipsistic conduct, which locks the individual in a form of moral and epistemological blindness.