The early English fiction mostly tried to teach the readers as well as to entertain them. Jane Austen, (if we dared to guess her great mind,) was believed to do this teaching enormously.
Women in her era could not get in the university, and would be lucky if received any schooling at all. It's all upon the parents' whim really. Therefore, Austen tried to teach her (female) middle-class readers in her novels, to encourage them to learn something from those novels and even to read them critically.