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As a novelist, Jane Austen draws at large on the literature of her century. She uses the insights and techniques of many earlier writers, not all of whom are by any means conservative. Poets of a philosophical temper, like Thomas Gray and William Cowper, historians like David Hume and Edward Gibbon, admire the wise man who stands aside from events both because he cannot influence them, and because they are not worth influencing. Austen's novels contain central characters more given to reflection than fictional heroes and heroines of the first part of the century, and she makes it clear how much she values the probings of the rational moral intelligence. Even the sentimentalists, whom she criticizes both for their opinions and for their execution, presumably bequeathed to her a new awareness of the reader's special relationship with the hero, and an example of how it might be influenced.
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