Life & Wisdom Quote by Jane Austen

Austen skewers a very particular kind of social power: the way elite “good speaking” can be engineered to communicate less, not more. The line turns on a delicious paradox. To speak “well enough” normally implies clarity, polish, accomplishment. Austen flips it into an accusation: refinement becomes a tool for producing fog. Unintelligibility isn’t an accident of poor expression; it’s a performance of status.

The subtext is social self-defense. In Austen’s world, conversation is currency and also surveillance. If you’re too direct, you expose desire, opinion, vulnerability - all risky in a room where reputations are traded like gossip. So the upper classes develop a kind of verbal embroidery: elegant circumlocution, tasteful vagueness, the art of sounding reasonable while committing to nothing. Austen’s narrator (or character) pretends to lack that skill, but the admission is barbed. It reads like humility; it lands like critique.

There’s also a moral edge. Austen consistently prizes discernment and sincerity, yet she’s too sharp to romanticize bluntness. Instead, she targets the hypocrisy of rhetorical polish divorced from meaning. The joke isn’t that language fails; it’s that people choose failure because it’s useful.

Context matters: Austen wrote amid a culture of “accomplishments” (proper speech, manners, taste) that signaled breeding. This line punctures that ideology with a pin: if eloquence can be used to evade, then “good speech” is not virtue - it’s leverage.