Garis, Robert. "Learning Experience and Change." Critical Essays on Jane Austen. ed. B.C. Southam. London" Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968.

The learning experience--character development--drives Austen's novels: when heroines grow, novels work. Key is 'sense'--seeing and behaving well. When heroines see well, behavior follows, and the emphasis is on seeing self and others as the really are and ought to be. The remainder of the paper demonstrates this theory is Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, as well as showing Austen's own growth as an author. The term sense, as Garis uses it, is nicely paralleled to my notion of being, from the Greek.