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For my generation of literature majors, the delicate, subtle, yet fiercely candid Jane Austen laid down a most insistent demand. The common(unspoken) assumption was that if you really understood Jane Austen's irony in Emma or Pride and Prejudice, you could never be the same person again. You would begin to understand the duplicitous ways in which vanity shaped your assumptions, the way that life tricked intelligent people even more that the dull. The ambitious little clergyman Mr. Collins really was "favored" by stupidity; he was impervious and therefore successful. Reading Jane Austen, you lose your moral innocence and relinquished assurance for something else---complexity, perhaps. Every force, every perception was both enriched and imperiled by doubleness: Life was not what it seemed. No, the famous irony insisted that life was treacherous; it did not necessarily collaborate woth goodwill. Jane Austen was literature's answer to Kant.