‘From Reading to Writing It Is But One Step’: Jane Austen, Criticism and the Novel in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

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.