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.