What’s Not in Austen?: Critical Quixotry in ‘Love and Freindship’ and Northanger Abbey

The first critics and theorists of the novel were, of course, novelists themselves. In their dedications and prefaces, they advertised and (often simultaneously) apologised for their work, in the process gradually developing a vocabulary for defining and discussing the genre. As Joseph Bartolomeo points out, such paratextual commentary by authors is often disingenuous. In novels ‘the fictionalising that is essential to the text can be — and often is — present in the preface as well … the assertions of the preface may be no more true than the characters and events in the novel’.5 Daniel Defoe who, like many early novelists, decries the prevalence of fiction while protesting the veracity of his own text, nevertheless presents his claims in the marketable language of novels in justifying his ‘new dressing up this Story’. He begins Moll Flanders with the following complaint: The World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances, that it will be hard for a private History to be taken for Genuine, where the Names and other Circumstances of the Person are concealed, and on this Account we must be content to leave the Reader to pass his own Opinion upon the ensuing Sheets, and take it just as he pleases. The Author is here suppos’d to be writing her own History … It is true, that the original of this Story is put into new Words, and the Stile of the famous Lady we here speak of is a little alter’d, particularly she is made to tell her own Tale in modester Words … The Pen employ’d in finishing her Story, and making it what you now see it to be, has had no little difficulty to put it into a Dress fit to be seen, and to make it speak Language fit to be read.6