Note: I've included details  that resemble Austen, while leaving it to my clever readers to spot them.​

Synopsis
   Modern Manners, an 1817 novel by an anonymous authoress, starts with the marriages of the parents of our main characters. Amelia has the good luck to captivate Henry Fitzgerald, a “gentleman from the Indies” (aka a man with a colonial fortune) who all the “Mamma’s” of the neighbourhood are angling after. Amelia’s match means she goes off to live in London and mingle with the ton. Her sister Matilda marries Mr. Oswald, a respectable vicar with a small independent fortune. Matilda “sighed at the idea of… her sister [Amelia] being lost in the fashionable vortex of dissipation and vanity."  
   The years pass, the countrified Oswalds have a daughter and the city-dwelling Fitzgeralds have two sons and a daughter. Mr. Fitzgerald becomes an MP and then is elevated to the peerage; now, instead of being the wife of a nouveaux riche Indian nabob, Amelia is Lady Fitzgerald. An easy-going woman of no strong opinions, Amelia is more engaged with her morning visits and playing cards than paying attention to the education and moral upbringing of her daughter Julia.
​     The Fitzgeralds come to visit the Oswalds and their lovely, sensible, daughter Emma. Julia Fitzgerald is a social butterfly and an enthusiast for Rousseau, rugged scenery, and defying whatever it is her parents want her to do. We learn that the oldest son, Frederic, is not very attentive to his fiancée. She is Elvina Dorrington, an Indian heiress. Emma Oswald, our main heroine, is intelligent, principled, and sincerely devout, and the author struggles to make her as interesting as Elvina and Julia...  

    By her own account, Jane Gardiner (1758–1840) was fortunate in her employers when she went to work in her mid-teens as governess for a genteel family with six daughters. Ten years later, she started her own school so she could offer a home to her parents and her invalid sister. By the time she retired at age 78, she had taught over 600 girls and worked for more than sixty years.
     Gardiner also published some children’s books. Her 1806 book, An Excursion from London to Dover, is explained by its subtitle: “Containing some account of the Manufactures, Natural and Artificial Curiosities, History and Antiquities of the Towns and Villages. Interspersed with Historical and Biographical Anecdotes, Natural History, Poetical Extracts, and Tales. Particularly Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Youth.”
     The book is narrated by Jeanette, who is travelling with her friend Adelina and Adelina's father Mr. A____. It’s like an 1806 version of The Magic Schoolbus but without the magic.
  All of this improving information is roughly tied to something approaching a plot, in which Mr. A_____ encounters several old school-mates or acquaintances on the journey. These additional adults give  impromptu lectures to the children, speaking off-the-cuff about everything from the development of paper to to the anatomy of the snail. Adelina and Jeanette also recite poems from memory, whether the topic under discussion is the ocean, hedgehogs, spiders, war, clouds, cuckoos, etc, and Jeanette has perfect recall of the biographies of eminent rulers, scientists, and statesmen. Gardiner also works in some short moral tales and a backstory or two.
      Writing after her mother’s death, Jane Gardiner’s daughter said of An Excursion: “Though this work does not possess much originality of thought, the reviewers allowed it to evince sound judgment, great taste, and an earnest desire to promote the improvement of the rising generation.”
     “Originality of thought,” is a euphemism for the fact that most of the book was what we today would call plagiarized.

   Ann WIngrove's The Spinster’s Tale (1801) caught my eye because of the title. It received no reviews when it was published, so here is another of my better-late-than-never book reviews. 
    The Spinster’s Tale is jam-packed with numerous plot-lines, backstories, and weddings. Plus a separate short gothic novel is stuck in the middle. There are so many characters, it’s difficult to remember them all.
    Have you seen people in social media point out that Regency romances are unrealistic because there weren’t that many eligible young dukes and earls in Regency England? Well, that was the case from the get-go; the novels written at the time featured handsome, eligible lords by the bushel. There are half-a-dozen titled men running around in this novel, all of them in want of a wife, and they all marry girls of humbler birth.
    One thing that sets this novel apart is that two of the major protagonists, and one minor, are older ladies. The titular spinster, Mrs. Caroline Herbert, ("Mrs." denotes an older lady, not necessarily a married one) is approaching 50. The kind and charitable Dowager Lady Brumpton has a fun back story where she dresses herself in boy’s clothes and climbs out a window after she’s abducted by a libertine. The minor character Miss Woodley is the impoverished authoress of the novel-within-a-novel Langbridge Fort. “Romance is not my forte,” she tells one of the young heroines, “but I had been told nothing would sell now, but the horrible, the wonderful, and the improbable.”
​      In addition to centering older females, The Spinster's Tale has other features which might be of interest to academics...

    “Miss Melinda Harley, of Yorkshire, may pass well enough for a country body; but really her history was not worth bringing up to town.”
    So goes one of several dismissive contemporary reviews for The History of Melinda Harley, Yorkshire (1777). The Westminster Review gave it only one sentence: “the history of an ephemera, that is born and dies on the same day.”
    Another reviewer joked: “It is the general character of many romances, that they are good for nothing; but we must except the History of Melinda Harley from this censure, for we can affirm, from our own experience, that it is admirably calculated—to procure sleep.”
    Ouch, ouch, and ouch, anonymous authoress! I feel for you. Yes, the plot is slight, the characters are wooden, and the detail is sparse, but I became quite interested in the wide variety of moralizing comments that Melinda Harley trades with her BFF Amanda Beaufort while Melinda is away visiting with family friends. The girls share their thoughts on the folly of dueling, the pending loss of the American colonies, and the consolations of religion.
   Some of their exchanges are the sort Mary Bennet would approve of:​​ “Most of our wants are artificial, and his happiness is much better assured who has learned to contract his desires.” “It is a great inducement to the exercise of benevolence, to view human nature in a fair light, and to put the best construction on one anothers’ actions.” Some remarks are explicitly political or feminist in tone.
  Some of these epistolary sermonettes touch on situations with similarities to Austen novels. I am not saying Austen drew from this novel, rather, that both writers drew from topics and situations prevalent at the time. I will share a few examples but I won’t point out which passage in which Austen novel they remind me of. If you’re not a Janeite, it won’t be relevant to you, and if you are a Janeite, you don’t need me to tell you...