[This book] looks at eight seemingly diverse characters in Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice, who display autistic traits. These characters--five in the Bennet family and three in the extended family of the Fitzwilliams--have fundamental difficulties with communication, empathy and theory of mind. Perhaps it is high-functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome that provides an explanation for some characters' awkward behaviour at crowded balls, their frequent silences or their tendency to lapse into monologues rather than truly converse with others. |
Book review by Michael Giffen: There's a danger when we apply clinical disorders to persons or characters we don't understand or don't like. Look at what critics who never knew Patrick White did to him and his novels.
High among the frontier problems between psychoanalysis and criticism, C.S. Lewis notices some critics use psychoanalysis to infer the pathology of an author from his or her work, which results not in literary criticism but in pathological biography.
