in your countenance and Air.'' It gave special directions for her conduct when with men, advising: ``Be careful of maintaining that strict Watch over your Eyes, Words, and Heart, that they may not in the least perceive you have any special Regard for them.'' Men, it warned, took great pleasure in being thought irresistable lovers, and in gaining victories over ``the most rigid virtue''; therefore, the young lady should put little confidence in what they promised, and when fine things were said to her, should ``acquit yourself by a gentle Smile accompanied with a Blush, to shew that you are neither a Prude or a Coquette.'' When questioned on the subject of matrimony, without betraying any personal inclination, she should reply that she was not the person to be consulted ``upon such a Head'', but rather her father and mother, whose will she would always make her own."(See also a summary of Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (mentioned in chapter 14 of Pride and Prejudice).It is interesting that the most explicit feminist protests by Jane Austen in her six novels all have to do with literature. InPersuasion, Anne Elliot debates Captain Harville on who loves longest, women or men:Captain Harville: "I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. ... But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." Anne Elliot: "Perhaps I shall. -- Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything." Northanger Abbey not only contains the "Defence of the Novel", but what has seemed to me to be a strong statement --Catherine Morland's faux-naf declaration: "But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in... I read it a little as a...
