Chapter 2 reads Austen’s first novel accepted for publication, Northanger Abbey, in terms of a zero-degree of intelligibility in communicative social exchange. Northanger Abbey presents Catherine Morland’s entry not just to Bath society but into the linguistic public. Throughout the novel, Catherine is subject to stratagems of deceit by her false friends, Isabella and John Thorpe. The latter even makes a coercive (and dishonorably deniable) marriage proposal that Catherine, in a state of absent-minded imaginative distraction, does not so much as uptake as information. J.L. Austin once identified untruth and unclarity as “the birthright” of all speakers. This mock birthright is the arrogation and entitlement of Thorpe. In a striking alignment of this kind of threat with its obverse – a critical investment of interest, if not fascination – Cavell explains his renewed reading of Austen only late in life as an exhausted intimacy with minor characters. In the tedious, packed rooms of Bath where nothing meaningful may happen, or originate, the main couple, Catherine and Henry, broach the possibility of intimacy through the precondition of the apartness of other minds.

Chapter 5 engages with a larger transhistorical discourse of female personhood, considering how the challenges that accompanied Austen’s public status are echoed in the reading and reception history of Mansfield Park. I move this discussion back to the 1772 Mansfield Decision, and forward to consider the controversy surrounding the far less momentous twenty-first century decision to place Austen on a British bank note. The open-ended, improvisatory, and uncontrollable nature of feelingly impactful speech links cultural and critical conversations to what J.L. Austin calls the perlocutionary realm of performative language. Perlocution, the dimension of language that most signals organizational breakdown, bogging down the progress of J.L. Austin’s official speech-act theory, is also the dimension or capacity of language through which paratextual literary encounters – allusions, conversations, revisions, and eventful readings – persist. This concern with doing things by our words as well as in them evokes a central feature of the enterprise of literary criticism altogether, I argue. For Cavell, the very mood and project of criticism is praise open to rebuke.

The Introduction, “On Criticism and other middle subjects,” presents the argument of J.L. Austin’s (1947–’48) Jane Austen-inspired lectures published as Sense and Sensibilia. Austin sharply criticizes, even satirizes, the dummy presentation of “medium-sized dry goods” in his era’s dominant positivist philosophy of sense data, countering the picture of the world of things as a dry-goods store from an affirmatively critical vantage within the same medium-scale world, in terms of the ready-to-hand. In Sense and Sensibilia, Austin argues that by seeking a single kind of statement about knowledge that is incorrigible (i.e., not subject to doubt or to further challenge, incapable of being proved wrong in any context), the sense data theory of perception seeks not so much knowledge as to eliminate all risk. The chapter situates Austin’s practice of linguistic phenomenology in terms of the near-contemporary construction of the history of literary criticism by I.A. Richards in Practical Criticism as a history of “middle subjects.”

Chapter 6, “Emma and Other Minds,” discusses Austin’s critique of certainty in “Other Minds,” and his account of the pluralities of verbal action in the essays “Pretending” and “A Plea for Excuses.” Austin’s arguments in these essays possess not only cognitive and epistemological dimensions; they are supremely rich investigations of moral thought and sociality: dimensions of life that produce endless opportunity for mistake. Illuminating Austen’s Emma, Austin’s rejection of the exclusive dimension of certainty driving so much modern theory of knowledge goes hand in hand with his recognition of the epistemological character of social responsibility. The novel’s famous scene at Box Hill enacts these dynamics in a tour de force of recursive layers. The ordinary-language philosophical topics treated in this chapter include moral luck, pretending, and the self-problematizing division (made famous by Paul de Man’s reading of Rousseau) between exculpatory confessions and pleasure-taking excuses. The chapter begins with Austin’s and Austen’s joint critique of certainty. It ends by dislodging omniscience as a placeholder of philosophical value.

Chapter 1, “Austen and Austin,” presents the details of the book’s central proposition that Jane Austen’s novels are not conduct books sharing preset values but philosophical studies of conduct more in the J.L. Austinian sense. The chapter claims that Austen – in common with the grouping of ordinary language philosophers I engage in this book: Austin, Wittgenstein, and Cavell (most of all) – does not view perception itself as a philosophical problem of major interest. My approach departs from the widespread view that Austen’s fiction reflects the mitigated skepticism of eighteenth-century empiricists and anticipates modernist literary impressionism. In the words of her Victorian critic G.H. Lewes, Austen’s epistemological project includes her cultivation of a prose style not visually hyper-realized, but “content to make us know” through the testing and textures of dialogue and character.