IT is remarkable how much discussion of and books there is in Jane Austen's novels. A character's interest in books and ability to discriminate among them are used by Austen as an index of that character's general powers of discrimination, from Northanger Abbey through to Sanditon. Reading, then, is used by Austen as a paradigm for the process of perception and judgment; it may also be instrumental in the plot of the novel. In Northanger A bbey and Sense and Sensibility, novels still closely bound to literary parody, Catherine Morland and Marianne Dashwood make embarrassing mistakes in judgment and action because they have read the wrong books, or read them too uncritically. In Pride and Prejudice, however, the kind of emphasized is not so much of books as of letters, especially in the first half of the novel. In fact, the turning point of the novel is the point when Elizabeth, after Darcy's letter, realizes how wrong she has been in reading him, herself, Wickham, and her family. As she says, Till this moment, I never knew myself.' It is in this sense -reading as a general process of perception and judgment -that Pride and Prejudice is a novel of education, education in the art of reading; for as Austen shows over and over in her novels, education is not the acquisition of information nor a matter of native talent but the cultivation