Notoriously private author ZADIE SMITH contends novels make moral arguments in the last talk of the Radcliffe Institute’s Dean’s Lecture Series.

All novels make moral arguments, although some of them are more subtle than others, according to novelist Zadie Smith, who spoke at Agassiz Theater yesterday.

Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, catapulted the 27-year-old author into stardom in 2000.

In that book, she wrote about cross-cultural relationships in contemporary London.

Latecomers were turned away from the packed theater yesterday as people flocked to see the notoriously private London-born author.

Smith attempted to debunk what she called the myth that only formidable texts on moral philosophy can speak to issues of morality.

She said that the lecture coincided with a book of essays she is writing as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

According to Smith, novels lend themselves to investigations of morality.

“My generation liked to be in some pain when we read. The harder it is, the better we feel about ourselves,” she said. “We rejected the idea that the novel could do us any good.”

Smith disputed this idea with examples from Jane Austen and E. M. Forster.

“Novels don’t share the epistemological privilege: that view from nowhere that moral philosophy has,” Smith said. “A novel never claims to be a view from nowhere; this is why we love them.”

Thus, Smith argued, novels always have an implicit moral stance.

Smith took her audience on a walking tour E. M. Forster’s book A Room With a View, and through various scenes out of Jane Austen books.

Smith summed up Austen as being the greater of the two authors, but criticized her as being two-dimensional in her treatment of morality.

Austen’s characters tend to be caricatures of virtues and vices, according to Smith.

“Jane Austen wears the ethics of reading on her sleeve,” she said.