Which writers influenced Jane Austen and is there a moral to her stories?

This podcast explores the way that Austen differs from other female novelists of her time, who often wrote melodramatic stories of virtuous heroines, kidnapped, and forced to suffer, before being rewarded with happy marriages. Austen's realism means that she avoids some of the black-and-white simplicity of Miss Prism's pronouncement: "The good ended happily; the bad ended unhappily. That is what Fiction means." (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest) Lydia is a morally transgressive character, and she has to live with the consequences of her actions... Though she is not punished in the way that Lady Catherine and Collins suggest she should be. Austen's preferred method of didacticism is through satire and wit.