She read novels and discussed them mainly with her female friends, most notably her mentor Anne Lefroy, but she also read sermons, essays, travel literature, biography and poetry.
Novels were a relatively new genre of literature and they came with a poor reputation: ‘the mere trash of the circulating library’, as Sheridan wrote in his smash hit stage-play The Rivals. The comic paradigm of the giddy novel reader was his Lydia Languish, a misguided reader of fiction: ‘the girl’s mad! – her brain’s turned by reading’ is the cry of Sir Anthony Absolute. Lydia tears out pages from Fordyce’s Sermons to use as curling paper for her hair. Jane Austen’s own Lydia in Pride and Prejudice also greatly dislikes Fordyce’s sermons. Sheridan’s play helped to perpetuate the idea that novels were an inferior form of writing. The idea that the wrong kind of books were dangerous to young females recurs throughout the eighteenth century, with commentators tut-tutting about ‘Romances, Chocolate, Novels and the like Inflamers’.9 Literary parody associated with the harmful effects of novel-reading on the naive mind is frequently found in late eighteenth-century essays and magazines and indeed in novels such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote.
Jane Austen did not conform to the view that circulating libraries were the repositories of pap. In 1798 she commented on the opening of a subscription library in Basingstoke, which she intended to join: ‘As an inducement to subscribe Mrs Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature etc etc – She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel-readers and not ashamed of being so.’10
When the family moved to Chawton, Austen joined a reading group and borrowed books from the Alton Book Society. Every member paid an annual subscription of a guinea. There were fines for the late return of books. By 1811, the club had well over two hundred works, kept in a special bookcase at the house of Mr Pinnock in Alton. A large proportion were of a serious non-fiction kind – on politics, travel, biography, history and theology. But novels were also available. In 1813, Jane read Rosanne, a deeply Christian novel, by Laetitia M. Hawkins. ‘We have got “Rosanne” in our Society, and find it much as you describe it; very good and clever, but tedious. Mrs Hawkins’ great excellence is on serious subjects. There are some very delightful conversations and reflections on religion: but on lighter topics I think she falls into many absurdities.’11 Falling into absurdities and lack of realism were Jane Austen’s chief criticism of particular kinds of novels, whether the excessively didactic, such as those of Mrs More, or the excessively romantic, such as those of Mrs Radcliffe. She preferred novels that were ‘natural’ and ‘true to life’ – those that, in the words given ironically to a foolish character in Sanditon, consist of ‘vapid tissues of ordinary Occurrences from which no useful Deductions can be drawn’.12
Since the form was held in such low esteem, Fanny Burney herself was wary of using the word ‘novel’, even though she had undertaken a sterling defence of the form in the preface to her first book, Evelina. Cecilia was sub-titled ‘memoirs of an heiress’ and Camilla ‘a picture of youth’. In the Advertisement, Burney described Camilla as ‘this little Work’ and even in 1814, by which time one would have expected her to have full confidence in the form, she wrote of the novel as a ‘species of writing never mentioned, even by its supporter, but with a look that fears contempt’.13 Austen borrowed the phrase ‘this little work’ for her Advertisement to Northanger Abbey, but within the book itself she is effectively telling her sister-authors that the time has come to stop apologizing and to stand up in defence of both the form and the word – ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’
Historically speaking, the flighty novel-reader was as likely to be male as female. Certainly Jane Austen took this view from the beginning of her writing career to the end. In her early work ‘Love and Freindship’ it is Edward the hero who is directly accused of gleaning absurd notions from reading fiction, and in Sanditon Sir Edmund Denham is enthralled by sensational novels and determined to be a ‘dangerous man, quite in the line of the Lovelaces’ (his allusion is to the charismatic rapist in Richardson’s Clarissa). Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey claims to have read ‘hundreds and hundreds of novels’ and teasingly defends his rights as a male reader: ‘for they read nearly as many as women’, he tells Catherine Morland.14
Though Northanger Abbey is a parody of the fashionable Gothic novel, it is also the occasion for Austen’s most impassioned defence of the form: ‘there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them’.15 In Northanger Abbey, literary taste is a guide to character; thus John Thorpe, the thuggish, boorish, booby squire, enjoys the Gothic lubricity of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk and the ‘fun’ of Mrs Radcliffe, but dislikes the kind of novels that Austen is intent on defending – such as those of Fanny Burney:
‘I was thinking of that other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant.’
‘I suppose you mean Camilla?’
‘Yes, that’s the book; such unnatural stuff! – An old man playing at see-saw! I took up the first volume once, and looked it over, but I soon found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it: as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was sure I should never be able to get through it.’
‘I have never read it.’
‘You had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not.’16
The ‘justness’ of this critique is ‘unfortunately lost’ on Catherine because at that moment they arrive at Mrs Thorpe’s lodgings, where John proves himself as ‘dutiful and affectionate’ a son as he is ‘the discerning and unprejudiced reader of Camilla’: he gives his mother a hearty shake of the hand and tells her that her ‘quiz of a hat’ makes her look like an old witch.
Henry Austen claimed that his sister’s favourite novelists were the two giants of eighteenth-century English fiction, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Richardson’s Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison were of enormous importance to her, and it is clear that she had an intimate knowledge of Fielding’s Tom Jones, which was often considered unsuitable for young ladies. But in her own magnificent defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey the exemplars are not the works of Richardson and Fielding:
‘I am no novel-reader – I seldom look into novels – Do not imagine that I often read novels – It is really very well for a novel.’ – Such is the common cant. – ‘And what are you reading, Miss –?’ ‘Oh! it is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. – ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.17
This passage makes clear that the novels she admired above all others were Fanny Burney’s Cecilia and Camilla and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.
Richardson had pioneered the heroine-centred novel of manners in Pamela, Sir Charles Grandison and Clarissa, but, much as Jane Austen admired him, his heroines are
