The 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth this year brings an overdue opportunity for a general audience to discover the female writers who most importantly influenced her – figures such as Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, celebrities in their own day, whose reputations were not fully eclipsed by Austen’s until late in the 19th century.
American rare books dealer Rebecca Romney offers a lively, personal account of collecting works by, and about, eight of Austen’s favourite women authors, all identifiable from mentions in her fictions and letters. Individual chapters focus on authors including — as well as Burney and Edgeworth — Ann Radcliffe (whose Gothic “romances” are gently parodied in Northanger Abbey); Elizabeth Inchbald (whose play Lovers’ Vows features in the plot of Mansfield Park), and Charlotte Smith (a poet who also wrote novels discussed by characters in the young Austen’s fragment story Catharine).
As Romney acknowledges, a decades-long tradition of feminist scholarship has enabled academics and students to appreciate the works of these authors, previously dismissed as inferior forerunners of Austen, if not omitted altogether from histories of the novel. But neither their writings — nor their eventful lives — have been embraced by popular culture like Austen’s, despite the availability of many of their works in modern editions and online.
Romney downplays both Edgeworth’s sophisticated engagements with post-union Ireland, and her complicated legacy in Irish literary history
Romney never fully confronts all the possible reasons why the Austen mystique continues to obscure these writers’ achievements — but she vividly communicates her sometimes surprised enjoyment of their works, finding them in some ways superior to Austen’s (Burney and Smith are credited with greater frankness concerning the sexual double standard, and the subjection of women under 18th-century British law).
Most importantly, Romney emphasises how Austen and her Regency-era contemporaries functioned as a literary community — showing Edgeworth as the correspondent of Inchbald, and as a reader of Austen, who sent her a copy of Emma. However, a lack of sustained attention to political contexts such as the Acts of Union (1800) makes for some reductive assessments. In regretting that Edgeworth became better known for her “regional” Irish tales than her London society novels (and despite enjoying Edgeworth’s Ennui and The Absentee), Romney downplays both Edgeworth’s sophisticated engagements with post-union Ireland, and her complicated legacy in Irish literary history, thus providing a demonstration of the very critical erasure that she otherwise admirably seeks to correct.
