This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws some occasional shade at the modern academy. The introductory post is here. My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. Spoilers abound in my discussion of these forgotten novels, and I discuss 18th-century attitudes which I do not necessarily endorse. |

Eliza Kirkham Mathews, by contrast, wanted to put her name on the title page of her novel What Has Been (1801). She had published her first collection of poems under her maiden name of Eliza Kirkham Strong, but when it came to her novel, her brother-in-law advised her against it. He seems to have had doubts about whether the novel would do well and therefore, the safer thing to do would be to publish anonymously. If the book sold well, she could always claim authorship later. However, we know that EKM did in fact write What Has Been even though her name is not on the title page because (1) the publication of the novel is documented in her husband's biography, (2) it contains poems which had previously been published under her (maiden) name, and (3) she drew on her own life for the plot.
But since EKM is still being listed as the author for Constance-- a book published when she was 13 years old, we might as well build an objective case for showing why these books were written by two different hands. For this task, I enlisted the help of Artificial Intelligence to study the sentence patterns and grammar. However, I have read both of these novels and am not relying on AI for my conclusions.