In an earlier post, I looked at a dramatic, romantic, (and oh-so-French) epistolary novel which received a disapproving review from The Quarterly Review. The review began:
     “Novels are read so generally and with such avidity by the young of both sexes, that they cannot fail to have a considerable influence on the virtue and happiness of society. Yet their authors do not always appear to be sensible of the serious responsibility attached to their voluntary task.”
        The problem with the novel Amelia Mansfield was that it glorified romantic love over everything else in life. The hero and heroine bring tragedy upon themselves and everyone around them -- not something that parents would want their sons and daughters to emulate.
        As I discussed in my previous post, concerns about the consequences of reading novels were widespread in Austen's time, so much so that the morality of books was a constant theme in novels and reviews of novels. For example, an early review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein sniffed that whatever might be the talents of the author, the book "inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality."

    Just imagine if almost every book review you read included a mention of whether the book had a good moral lesson. That was the case in Austen's time, when novels were viewed with suspicion and concern.

     The chief criticism of novels was that:

• they were more thrilling than the real world, and therefore distracted people from the real world. 
• they were so romantic that they gave young people, especially young women, unrealistic ideas about love and life.
• they glamorized vice.

    For the next few posts, I'll look at these discussions from Austen's time, including some examples of how novels were portrayed in the novels themselves. And of course we'll visit Jane Austen's famous defense of the novel in Northanger Abbey.​  ​