Introduction: Fiction and the Literary Marketplace, 1785–1820

Abstract

To say that Jane Austen was a determined author accurately conveys how self-assured she was in her calling as a novelist. Despite outright rejection and mishandling of her fiction by publishers, as well as unwelcome suggestions regarding which subjects she should deal with, Austen held firm to her principles and eventually published her own distinctive novels on her own distinctive terms. Certainly, her works were not best sellers when they were first published—especially when compared to her more successful peers, Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Amelia Opie, and of course Sir Walter Scott. Nevertheless, by the very act of holding firm to her authorly principles, Austen has, over the past two centuries, gained a near-magisterial place in posterity. The title of this study, however, also articulates another imperative that was fundamental to Austens literary career: the degree to which her development as an author was determined by the immediate print culture she encountered and engaged with. In light of this, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author seeks to provide an alternative context for Austens later novels, by challenging two significant assumptions that have generally been made about the development of fiction since the end of the eighteenth century The first is the notion that, from the 1790s, novel production continued to increase in a linear fashion, without any major interruptions.

The most uninteresting, dry, improbable, trifling work that the novel-press, in its late laborious efforts, has produced. When will the dreary prospect be enlivened again by a work of real genius?

Critical Review (1791)

When the novelist or romancer improves the taste, and raises the moral tone of the mind; when he renders Religion attractive even to the world, by painting her with all those pleasing attributes which the world is unwilling to allow her; then I assert, that fiction accomplishes the noblest ends of truth itself.

T. B. Macaulay (1816)