Note 5 — A STUDY IN FINE ART (Jane Austen, 1775-1817)
Reading edition
It is scarcely necessary, perhaps, to remark that the word “realism” is used, here and elsewhere, without any reference to the limited significance it has recently acquired. Realism, of course, really means truthfulness to life, including imagination, faith, poetry, and the ideal; and not a photographic reproduction of certain unpleasant, more or less abnormal, phases of human nature.