Hermeneutics is “of, relating to, or concerning interpretation or theories of interpretation” (OED). It is what James Wood uses to describe Jane Austen’s heroines - hermeneutical. They were people “who understood other people, who attended to their secret meanings, who read people properly…”
James Wood argues that the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher influenced Austen’s work. Schleiermacher “stressed repeatedly that hermeneutics could be applied to ordinary conversation as well as to the Scriptures” and gave a speech wherein he “referred to the art of reading ‘significant conversations’”. He asked his audience: “Who could move in the company of exceptionally gifted persons without endeavouring to hear ‘between’ their words, just as we read between the lines of original and tightly written books? Who does not try in a meaningful conversation, which may in certain respects be an important act, to lift out its main points, to try to grasp its internal coherence, to pursue all its subtle intimations further?” James Wood writes: “This is what the Austen heroine does.”
I really liked Jane Austen when I was young. I must have picked up on all this “inwardness” because I thought it applied to everyone. I suppose that was why I was frustrated when my not-yet-husband saw me as beautiful but opaque. The visual impairment had to be made up for with words. It’s strange how Austen’s heroine’s are to be admired for their inward life and yet only a writer of talent is able to expose their quality. It makes them inimitable…
“I have a wonderful inward life!”
”Oh yeah? So…?”
James Wood says it is what made Jane Austen happy: “I suspect that Jane Austen, so private, so enigmatic and contradictory, went through life as if she were the possessor of a clandestine happiness. Like her heroines, she saw things more clearly than other people and therefore pitied their cloudiness.”
(All quotes from The Broken Estate; Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood, pp 32-41.)