Jane Austen’s remarks about her contemporaries Mary Brunton and Jane West are characteristically double-edged, and in both cases tinged with admiration and professional jealousy. Self Control, not Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, was, as Anthony Mandal reminds us, the runaway success of 1811, while ‘good Mrs. West’s’ Letters to a Young Lady, published in the same year, immediately went through four editions in 1811 alone. In the competitive literary marketplace of the 1810s, Austen’s success was much more modest. Perhaps the more overtly didactic work of West and Brunton had a more immediate and obvious appeal to the readership; perhaps their publishers simply did a better job at marketing their works. In West’s case, of course, she was already a known name by 1811, in the genres of both conduct literature and the novel, and that, in itself, might have been enough to guarantee greater success than could be expected for the debut novel of an anonymous Hampshire lady. But the key point to note is that all three writers were competing for a share of the same market and readership, and that they were benefiting from a particular kind of anti-Jacobin public feeling that, by the 1810s, had come to associate sensibility and emotional freedom with the French Revolution and its terrifying aftermath, and reason, sense and emotional regulation with its opposition.

In this essay, I consider the publication context of Northanger Abbey, focusing in particular on the pressures exerted by the literary marketplace, and Austen’s alertness to it, on that novel. Beginning with a discussion of Austen’s interactions with the two publishing firms which failed to publish her works, Cadell & Davies and Crosby & Co., I then consider the changes in places, manners, books and opinions that occurred between the novel’s first conception in 1798–9 and its final publication in December of 1817. Placing Northanger Abbey’s literary allusions and general intertextuality in the context of the changes in the literary marketplace through the three decades of its production, I suggest that some of the novel’s tonal oddities, and its relative unpopularity with contemporary readers and reviewers are a direct result of Benjamin Crosby’s decision not to publish the novel then known as ‘Susan’ in 1803.

Introduction

How can we know what historical readers thought about their reading? Since its inception as a field of scholarly enquiry, the history of reading has wrestled with the problem of finding representative evidence about the reading practices of historical readers. Research in the field has uncovered a plethora of different types of evidence: publication and sales statistics, lending library records, informal reading lists, educational syllabi, the notes of reading groups and also the material left by individual readers, including marginalia and annotations, diaries and journals, letters, autobiographies and memoirs.

An interdisciplinary field of study, the history of reading has grown considerably in the half-century since the publication of Richard D. Altick's The English Common Reader (1957). Scholars from a variety of different disciplines have shown an interest in what people read in the past and how they read it. In addition to conducting analyses of individual readers, reading groups and social classes, scholars such as Rolf Engelsing and Paul Saenger have sought to explain the evolution of reading and especially the connections between the peculiarities of reading in consecutive time periods, through a number of large historical frameworks. These grand narratives have tended to emphasize the decisive shift from reading aloud to reading silently (Saenger), and from intensive to extensive reading (Engelsing), during the post-Gutenberg proliferation of print and the rise of mass literacy in the late eighteenth century respectively. Period-specific studies have also argued for specific fashions or tastes in reading. Scholars have often turned to contemporary accounts of reading practice and the quantitative (though not necessarily hard) evidence of print runs and library borrowing records to chart the rise of fall of literary genres or the cultural impact of particular writers. Anecdotal and personal accounts of reading have often been given less weight, perhaps with some reason. Records kept by individual readers have oft en been regarded as too exceptional to offer useful conclusions about reading practice outside the specific cases concerned.

In the previous chapters, I suggested that Austen's novels provide models of resistance and change for a hypothetical reader, through what William Galperin calls the ‘counter-hegemonic practices of reading’ she makes available. I also proposed the argument that these practices were grounded in gender-related strategies of indirection. In my argument, the hypothetical reader recognizes the tension between, for example, Pride and Prejudice's realistic social criticism and its final ‘aesthetic gratification’, or Mansfield Park's apparent conservative moral ideology and its complicated intertextual structure, resisting collusion with the norms of taste that the novels set up. Reading in this way, I have argued, is both strenuous and ludic. For the hypothetical reader, reading, as Johanna M. Smith puts it, is ‘not passive consumption’ but instead a form of production.

But did Austen's actual historical readers take up the teasing challenges of her prose style? Discussing Richardson's Clarissa, Ruth Perry argues that ‘Clarissa got under the skin of women of Richardson's generation because, as with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, their lives provided the raw materials for his imagination’. Clarissa, in other words, represented women readers to themselves. Austen's novels, drawing on and rewriting Richardson, also ‘got under the skin’ of their readers (and still do). Both troubling and consoling, they, like Richardson's, reflect the experience of intelligent, articulate women in cultural situations unsympathetic to their intelligence and eloquence. Unlike Clarissa, Austen's novels provide happy endings for such women, thus holding out the possibility that society can accommodate, even reward, women like Elizabeth Bennet, witty, impertinent and eloquent.

Before turning to consider individual readers in detail, it is important to sketch out some of the significant contexts within which readers encountered Austen's works. As Anthony Mandal has recently brilliantly demonstrated, placing Austen's novels within the context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century publishing trade allows us to better understand both her novels and their relationship to the popular fiction of her period. Here, we will deal first with the material qualities of the books in which the works were found, since these can play an important part in influencing readers. When Charlotte Brontë first came across Pride and Prejudice in late 1847, she wrote to G. H. Lewes of the ‘accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face’ that she found in it. Most critics take this to be a metaphorical description, but as Brian Southam points out, ‘“commonplace” engraved portraits of Elizabeth Bennet face the reader on the title-pages of Bentley's 1833 edition of Pride and Prejudice’. Were Brontë's responses to reading Austen coloured by the kinds of illustrations she encountered in the novel? Was she, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by them? Without knowing which edition Brontë was reading, it would be impossible to know the extent to which Charlotte Brontë's impressions of Austen's work – ‘an accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck […] elegant but confined houses’ – represent descriptions of actual illustrations, metaphorical descriptions of Austen's writing, or a combination of the two.

The ‘Austen Controversy’ (1841-1845)

Between July 1841 and June 1845, Mary Russell Mitford and Elizabeth Barrett Browning engaged in a long-running affectionate epistolary argument about Jane Austen. Mary Mitford read Austen's novels in the Murray and Egerton editions but it is not known which edition/s Barrett Browning used, though it seems probable that she either owned or borrowed Bentley's edition. In the correspondence, both women demonstrate clearly their own allegiances through their manoeuvrings with Austen's name. They are both, more generally, oppositional readers who choose to define themselves against cultural stereotypes of the ‘bad’ female reader; in this series of letters, they also come to define their literary selves through their opposition to each other. In the course of their discussion we can trace two different visions of what a novel should be: Mitford's, whose model is Jane Austen, and whose belief is that accurate pictures of conventional life may contain within them the truths of the human heart, and Barrett Browning's, for whom ‘Conventional Life is not the Inward Life’. The clash is, in broad terms, between the novel of manners and the novel of psychological life, and between a pre-Romantic and post-Romantic literary sensibility. While Mitford passionately admires Austen, and considers her novels models of great literature, Barrett Browning objects to Austen on the grounds of lack of ‘poetry’, ‘inner life’ or ‘ideal aspiration’. When discussing Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë poses the question ‘[can] there be a great artist without poetry?’, and finds Austen ‘without “sentiment,” without poetry’, concluding that she therefore ‘cannot be great’.

Stereotypes of the Reading Public

Moralists and other cultural commentators of the late eighteenth century were, as we have seen, particularly concerned about the reading habits of young female readers. Their worries and concerns were both intensified and developed in the nineteenth century. Born of the explosion of cheap print in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the increase in mass literacy over the course of the century, concerns about the abilities of the reading public more generally frequently surfaced in visual art, fiction, and, in particular, the periodical press, throughout the nineteenth century. During this period, therefore, whichever edition they happened to be reading, and however they responded to the material qualities of the book itself, Austen's readers were faced by particular cultural stereotypes about reading, which affected the ways in which many of them, particularly her female and labouring-class readers, responded to fiction generally, and also to her novels in particular. The material considered here is taken from a wide and deep survey of periodical publications, from highbrow literary reviews such as the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Review, through general interest periodicals such as Tinsley's Magazine and The Quiver to more esoteric material, such as The What-Not, The Ladies' Treasury, The Cabinet of Fashion and Romance and The Englishwoman's Magazine and Christian Mother's Miscellany. The periodical publications considered have different ostensible aims, they are directed towards different consumer groups, they enjoy different political, moral and intellectual reputations and cultural resonances, and they deal with different subjects and are written in a range of different registers.

Jane Austen's Reading

As a child and young woman, living with her family in Steventon Rectory, Jane Austen had access to her father's library of some five hundred volumes, many of which she read, along with books borrowed from friends, neighbours and wider family members. After the family's move to Bath, when her father's library was sold, and the family's second move to Southampton after the death of the Reverend George Austen, Jane Austen borrowed books from the circulating libraries of Bath and Southampton, and enjoyed borrowing and reading books from the private libraries of friends and relations during her sometimes lengthy visits to them. In particular, Austen seems to have relished her brother Edward Knight's library at Godmersham Park, and to have taken full advantage of his collection. While they were in Bath and Southampton, Henry Austen sent his mother and sisters works from London, and they also sometimes received newspapers and periodicals from the same source, and, rather like the Dashwood family in Sense and Sensibility, from friends and neighbours. When Jane, Cassandra, Mrs Austen and Martha Lloyd made their home in Chawton, in 1809, the Austens formed part of the Chawton Book Society, and Jane continued to borrow books from both public and private libraries. In the last three years of her life, once she belonged to the prestigious John Murray stable of authors, she received the latest publications as loans from her publisher.

This book is about the complex and unequal relationships between texts and readers. These take place in the realm of the imagination, although they have a partial manifestation in the material, in the form of writing. The first part of the book focuses on Jane Austen's negotiations with her reading, her reinterpretations of her period's strictures about reading women and women's reading, and her representations of readers in the novels, letters, juvenilia and fragments. It also discusses aspects of her style that have far-reaching ramifications in the responses of her readers. Part Two considers the textual and historical contexts of her works, and the kinds of relationships that historical readers have had with Austen and her novels. By examining Austen's British readers' views about reading generally, and specifically about reading Austen, as represented in their letters, journals, memoirs, critical writing and autobiographies, we come to a better understanding both of the qualities of Jane Austen's works, and of the practice of reading in Britain in different historical periods. My aim throughout this work is to maintain a dual focus on Jane Austen and her readers, conceiving of the relationship between them as a kind of conversation: a dynamic two-way process wherein readers respond to the novels, but the novels and characters are also brought to life, re-imagined, re-created and re-invented in and through the reading experience in its totality.

Although discussion of Austen's earliest readers, in the shape of her family and immediate circle of friends, has already informed the argument of this book thus far, we will begin our detailed analysis of Austen's individual readers with the first generation of her literary successors, primarily with female authors, as these are the readers for whom the kinds of questions, problems and issues outlined in the previous chapters are most pressing. Austen's female successors frequently needed to establish themselves, as readers and writers, in opposition to the kinds of stereotypes and clichés discussed in Chapters 1 and 5. This chapter and those following discuss the implications of writers' various interactions with Austen's name in establishing their literary identities. As we will see, over the course of the long nineteenth century, Jane Austen became the publicly acceptable face of the woman writer, and, as literary women, writers from Mary Russell Mitford to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf compared themselves to Austen. They were also aware of the ways in which they were both implicitly and explicitly compared to her. Their reactions to her reveal important truths, not only about the ways in which Austen's novels acted on her successors, but about those successors' fears, insecurities and doubts about their position in the literary marketplace, their duties as professional women writers, and their responsibilities as women. Their negotiations with Austen's name show up their priorities as readers and writers, manifested in discussions over the characteristics of great literature, the proper behaviour for a professional female writer, the importance of a female tradition, the value of emotional responses, and debates about what a novel should be.

Many of the interactions with Jane Austen described in these final chapters do not appear, at first glance, to take up the challenging invitations of her style. Readers who find in Austen ‘morality’, ‘health’ and ‘consolation’ are, it could be argued, resisting her challenges to ideology and ignoring the disruptive energies of her novels. Or it could be argued that these readers are in fact interpreting Austen more accurately, that whatever the energies of the prose style, the eventual result of the novels is a confirmation or affirmation of domestic sociability, peaceful country life and happy marriages. Readers who value and trust in Austen's happy endings are, of course, many. Winston Churchill was not the only person to find Austen's novels to be consolatory in war time – an anonymous Mass Observation respondent similarly ‘could read nothing but Jane Austen's Emma when war broke out’, and Anna Neagle, who starred in a war-time stage production of Emma, called it ‘perfect escapist entertainment’. A whole novel, Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), takes as its premise the idea that regularly reading Jane Austen is the way to find a happy marriage, ending with the words:

In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey argues that Jane Austen ‘assumed that a novel could simultaneously gratify the cravings of the imagination and provide moral instruction’, and that ‘she thus manages to satisfy both the individual reader's desire for emotional gratification and the program of education prescribed by traditional moral aestheticians’. Chapter 1 outlines the ‘program of education prescribed by traditional moral aestheticians’, with particular reference to its directives about female reading and their relationship to the status of the novel. Poovey's central assumption that Austen's novels find a way to combine pleasure and instruction is certainly correct (although I do not believe they do so entirely to the service of the ‘domestic ideology’, as Poovey suggests), as is her belief that ‘at their most sophisticated, Austen's rhetorical strategies harness the imaginative energy of her readers to a moral design’. However, in the light of the material considered in Chapters 1 and 2, Poovey's suggestion that Austen could ‘assume’ that a novel could provide moral instruction is surprising, particularly when set in the context of the reputation of the female-authored novel in Austen's period.

The evidence suggests that Austen's society ‘assumed’ rather the opposite from the position outlined by Poovey: that whatever potential for good the novel might have, in practice it was more likely to cause harm.

Jane Austen was far from opposed to the central tenets of conduct literature, with its strong emphasis on New Testament Christianity, propriety and good manners, prudence, economy, modesty and good sense. Her early anti-heroine, Camilla Stanley, of Catharine; or, The Bower, for example, is described in terms that are strongly reminiscent of the conservative conduct-book writers of the late eighteenth century:

Similarly, when Austen writes of Harriet Smith's riddle-book that ‘the only literary pursuit which engaged Harriet at present, the only mental provision she was making for the evening of life, was the collecting and transcribing all the riddles of every sort that she could meet with, into a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper, made up by her friend, and ornamented with ciphers and trophies’, she is both mocking Harriet's vapidity, and making a serious point about her intellectual deprivation. She does so in terms that reflect Hannah More's concerns that women are educated ‘exclusively, for the transient period of youth, when it is to maturer life we ought to advert’.

A later generation of readers and writers, at a greater chronological distance from Austen herself, were influenced in their turn by the biographical portrait presented to them in James Edward Austen-Leigh's 1870 Memoir. It sparked off a new wave of critical interest in Jane Austen, but it also perpetuated a view of Austen that stressed her domesticity and played down her literary commitment. One anecdote in particular – that of Austen's practice of hiding her work under a sheet of blotting paper if surprised in the process of composition – caught the attention of a number of readers. Austen-Leigh writes:

The anecdote presents Austen as a writer for whom privacy was all-important, but also as one for whom writing had to give way to ‘casual interruptions’, and hence who could not give it her whole attention.