James Edward Austen-Leigh's biography of his aunt, Memoir of Jane Austen, both emerges from and contributes to a particular view of Austen herself and of a woman's proper place. Any notion that Austen might have been a feminist must be absurd not because Austen was imagined to be contented with a life of modest, feminine domesticity but also on the grounds that concepts and arguments about the structure of society in general or rights in particular were imagined to be as much beyond her ken as they were beyond her inclination. Marilyn Butler shows that Austen's contemporaries were absorbed in the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary debates that shook English culture in the wake of the French Revolution. Jane Austen favored the principles of the rational, moral cultivation of women and of the exercise of sound judgment in conducting their lives so as to minimize the nature of sexual difference.