Abstract
Frances Burney’s hugely successful first novel Evelina (1778) opens with an anonymous, ironic appeal to ‘the authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’, for ‘protection’, addressing them as ‘Magistrates of the press, and Censors for the Public’ — ‘those who publicly profess themselves Inspectors of all literary performances’.3 In a book published 40 years later, the narrator of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is still voicing objections to the reviewers’ treatment of novels. Evelina’s mocking dedication to its reviewers and the dismissive account of their successors in Northanger Abbey’s polemic provide us with synecdochic evidence of the ongoing conflict between novelists and reviewers, and the ‘threadbare strains’ in which the quarrel was conducted.
Authors are partial to their wit, tis true,
But are not critics to their judgment too?
—Alexander Pope
The Critick’s judgment may be right, or it may be wrong; his taste good or bad: there is no greater probability, that an unknown person, who gives his opinion upon books once a month, or once a quarter, should be right, than that any other unknown person should be so, who delivers his in a parlour
—Anna Laetitia Barbauld2
Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? … Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.
(NA, 37)
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Notes
Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1711), in Selected Poetry, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–20, 1.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, protesting negative reviews of Maria Edgeworth’ s Tales of Fashionable Life. Letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine 80 (March 1810), 210–12.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 457–63, 457–8.
Frances Burney’ Evelina: or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778), ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford University Press, 2002), 5.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3.
See Derek Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh: 1788–1802 (London: Methuen, 1978), 21–3.
Laura Runge, ‘Momentary Fame: Female Novelists in Eighteenth-Century Book Reviews’, in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R. Backsheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 276–98, 276.
See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 173–4. St Clair’s assessment of anonymity implying that, although ‘a high proportion of the novelists of the romantic period were women, therefore, this was not obvious or known to readers at the time’, does not necessarily agree with the evidence of novel reviewers, whose misogynistic, condescending language suggests an assumption that novelists are women. St Clair further finds, however, that ‘there is little evidence that readers cared much about the identity or gender of the writers of the novels they read’. Ibid., 174.
Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740–1815: With a Catalogue of 1375 Magazine Novels and Novelettes (Oxford University Press, 1962), 1–2.
Edward Copeland, ‘Money Talks: Jane Austen and the Lady’s Magazine’, in Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan, ed. J. David Grey (Ann Arbor and London: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 153–71.
Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), ed. Lewis M. Knapp (Oxford University Press, 1998), 127–8.
Laura L. Runge’ Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism 1660–1790 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3, 20.
Jane Austen, The Book Collector 15 (1966), 143–51, 143, 146.
David Gilson mentions Cope’s article in ‘The Austens and Oxford: “Founder’s Kin”’, in Jane Austen: Collected Articles and Introductions (Privately printed, 1998), 127–9, 128.
Peter Sabor, ‘Introduction’, in Jane Austen, Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge University Press, 2006), xxx
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Viking, 1997), 63.
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Margaret Doody, ‘Introduction’, in Jane Austen, Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray (Oxford University Press, 1993), xxxv.
Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 21.
Joseph Addison, Spectator No. 271, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 2: 555.
See also Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford University Press, 2005), 223.
Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24.
Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50), ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford University Press, 1981), 88–9.
Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2006), 120.
Byron’s Juvenilia’, in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf: ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 122–37, 134.
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See Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
William Mason, Elfrida: A Dramatic Poem (Edinburgh: Hamilton and Balfour, 1755).
James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791), ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford University Press, 1980), 607.
Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford University Press, 1988), 268.
Ann Radcliffe, The Italian: or the Confessional of the Black Penitents, A Romance (1796), ed. Robert Miles (London: Penguin, 2000), 337.
Emma Parker’s Elfrida: Heiress of Belgrove, A Novel (London, 1811).
Alison G. Sulloway Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 47.
Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols (Oxford University Press, 1972), 1: 42.
Frances Burney, Camilla, or a Picture of Youth (1796), ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford University Press, 1972), 305, 310–11.
Ruth Perry in Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980)
George E. Haggerty explores the subject at length in Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (1791), ed. J. M. S. Tompkins (Oxford University Press, 1988), 194.
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Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote: or the Adventures of Arabella (1752), ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford University Press, 1989), 260.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 113.
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See Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (New York: Penguin, 2004), 93.
See Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17.
Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1957), 30, 52.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 16 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 1: 23 289.
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Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1794)
Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791)
Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801)
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Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1997), 30.
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© 2013 Olivia Murphy
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Murphy, O. (2013). ‘From Reading to Writing It Is But One Step’: Jane Austen, Criticism and the Novel in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. In: Jane Austen the Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292414_1
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