This chapter examines whether Jane Austen's novels are naturalistic. Austen's Flemishness was a different kind of European style, in which the “subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.” In his comparative analysis with Maria Edgeworth, Richard Whately emphasizes the crucial alliance between the natural and the probable in Austen's fiction. Edgeworth, like many other novelists, may have cracked one (the natural) but not the other (the probable). Both are necessary for perfect fiction. The terms of the canonical discourse around Austen's “naturalistic” fictions are familiar. D.A. Miller calls the bluff of Austen's naturalism by calling up her intention: “The first secret of Austen Style [is that] its author hates style, or at any rate, must always say she does".