Karen Valihora Austen’s Oughts: Judgment after Locke and ShaftesburyAusten’s Oughts: Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury. Karen Valihora. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. Pp. 363.

Abstract

The overarching concern with the relation between ethics and aesthetics is well served, however, through the canvassing of such cultural expressions as the sublime, the grand style, or the picturesque. After taking the unusual line that Reynolds’s Discourses (1797) “actually challenge the ‘grand style’” (224), Valihora goes on to argue (pace Uvedale Price) that Reynolds was a major source of inspiration for writers on the picturesque and then to approach Pride and Prejudice through this movement. Many readers are likely to jib at her attribution here of the portrait of Darcy at Pemberley to Sir Joshua simply on the grounds that the housekeeper who shows it is a Mrs. Reynolds. Jane Austen remarked, after all, that she stood no chance of finding a likeness of Mrs. Darcy in an exhibition of Reynolds’s work, and Mrs. Reynolds may be so named because of the encomium she offers on her employer.7