LITERARY CONTEXT

   In Jane Austen’s day, many people who read novels were ashamed to admit it. At that time the term novel had a negative connotation. It referred to the most popular literature of the day—sentimental romances featuring refined and emotional heroines who are rescued from dangerous situations by handsome and courageous heroes. Such books were churned out quickly and devoured by a mainly female middle-class audience. Closely related to the sentimental novel was the gothic novel, whose hallmarks included dark castles, secret chambers, and rusty daggers dripping with blood. “Mere trash” was what Austen called this popular fiction.

   Austen was familiar with the “fashionable novels” of the time and even parodied one in her mock-gothic Northanger Abbey (1818). But she admired the more realistic novels written earlier in the eighteenth century, especially those of Samuel Richardson. Richardson’s novels were studies of everyday middle-class characters, who stood out for their intellectual and moral qualities, rather than their social connections. Austen also admired Fanny Burney, another author who wrote about middle-class society but focused on female characters. Burney used Richardson’s epistolary form, in which a story is told entirely through letters, in her novel, Evelina. After Evelina, however, Burney shifted to using a third-person narrator, who reports on and filters the characters’ internal thoughts.

   When Austen began to write novels, she adopted the form of Burney’s later work. Having an omniscient, or all-knowing, narrator allowed Austen to control point of view more closely and to present her characters’ inner thoughts and feelings. At the same time, through the voice of the narrator she could convey a contrasting, or critical, view of the action. This contrast between the awareness of the characters and that of the narrator and the reader is known as dramatic irony. While Austen’s ironic perspective is subtle and always good-humored, her writing clearly makes readers aware of her characters’ follies and shortcomings.

   Through her realistic and sophisticated approach to fiction, Austen helped to transform the status of the novel in the 1800s.