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The Novel and the romantic century, 1750–1850

One purpose of our panel is ask what might be gained by situating the study of the English novel in a "Romantic Century" spanning 1750-1850 rather than under the more customary rubrics rooted in the long eighteenth century. My short answer is that there is a lot to be gained, but as someone trained in eighteenth-century studies rather than Romanticism, I must admit to thinking that a lot might be lost as well. First for the gains. The very fact that this discussion has been organized by Romanticists rather than by eighteenth-century scholars (my usual cohorts) is significant, for eighteenth-century scholars have as a rule been uninterested in fiction written after Fielding and Richardson. A brief glance at Jane Austen and her outlook on the novel as it appeared at the end of the eighteenth and the outset of nineteenth century underscores this point dramatically. In the fifth chapter of Northanger Abbey, Austen's narrator, having consigned her heroine to a cozy morning of novel-reading, launches into a spirited and highly partisan defense of her novels, "Yes: novels," she reiterates, defiantly. Not for her the diffidence fellow novelists employ to conciliate the critics; not for her the invention of a heroine who demurs "'I am no novel reader — I seldom read novels' . . . 'And what are you reading, Miss —?' 'Oh! It is only a novel!'" Censuring the collective self-deprecation of novelists, Austen goes on the offensive against a literary establishment that complains tirelessly and all too predictably about the "trash with which the press groans." Reviewers, she claims, lavish praise upon the same anthologies of the same dozen lines from "Milton, Pope, and Prior" along with the same "paper from the Spectator, and chapter from Sterne," while disparaging with "common cant" the labors of novelists, which (by marked contrast) have "only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them" (NA 37). What is most striking about this intervention is that when Austen imagines the novel, she thinks of a canon comprised solely of late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century writers such as Burney, Edgeworth, and (let's