Re: Of cabbages and kings....

Thank you for explaining what you mean by naivety. As I said before I understand that you are expressing an opinion. I'm not claiming Austen is infallible but I do find her characters realistic.

As it happens I did have the very great pleasure of knowing someone exactly like Jane Bennet. It wasn’t that she was unable or unwilling to see the faults in others. It was just that she genuinely saw the best in people and she had a way about her that brought out the best in everyone around her. It’s hard to explain, she wasn’t a goody-goody type person, or unrealistic. There was one person we both knew who was particularly disagreeable but she was able to look at her more deeply at this person and see the pain she had experienced and emphasize with her, and to look even more deeply than that and see the goodness that was at this persons core and help the rest of us to see these things that her harshness had caused us to overlook. Like Jane Bennet she was firm when she felt she was right but she was firm in a way that didn’t put other people on the defensive. She was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known. She also drove through a really bad section of town without locking her doors and said afterwards, “I can’t help it. I just trust people.” So in that way I guess you could say she was naive, but it wasn’t the sort of naiveté that comes from not knowing better or ignoring real life. She genuinely didn’t have it in her to be distrustful regardless of what life threw at her.