In Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues Sarah Emsley follows Alistair MacIntyre in seeing Austen as “the last great representative” of the “tradition of the virtues”. Jane Austen emerges from these pages as a woman who takes ethical development and the vocation of novelist seriously.

Emsley sees Austen as conservative yet flexible, crucially interested in how the classical and the Christian virtues interact and sometimes compete in life as lived in her time. Emsley argues with conviction that Austen’s heroines are less centrally concerned with “Whom shall I marry?” than with “How should I live my life?”—and accordingly that Austen’s novels present, in diverse ways that highlight various virtues and combinations of virtues, moral educations that prepare her characters for ethical action in their communities. Thus Austen’s fictions offer “living arguments” for the practice of the virtues, both classical (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance) and Christian (charity, faith, hope).

Slavoj Zizek calls Jane Austen “the only counterpart to Hegel in literature” for the way that her novels employ dialectical progression as a tool for arriving at a pure truth (62). Zizek provides many examples of different Austenian equivalents to Hegelian theories. Additionally, he suggests that whether or not Austen was actually purposely utilizing and referencing Hegel, she was still the only writer of her time to truly understand the philosophy of human interaction and relationship.

Austen participates in the longstanding debate about the choice "between virtue and commerce, virtue and corruption, virtue and passion," a debate that has been engaged in "every phase of Western tradition,