The many generous subscribers to Miss M.C. Squire’s first novel, The Beggar and His Benefactor (1809), must have wondered if they got their money’s worth. The book is only 120 pages long; it’s  the barest sketch of a novel grafted onto a travelogue about Plymouth and Cornwall. For a novel of the long 18th century, it's singularly devoid of sentiment or sensation.
    So why is Miss Squire my author of the week?  Well, for one thing, even trite and second-rate novels give me food for thought about the opinions and preoccupations of Austen's era. I'm learning about attitudes toward the class system and relations between the sexes. And for another, I'd like to bring Miss Squire to the attention of scholars because Squire uses people of color to teach a moral lesson in her first novel and her second novel includes a narrative of the slave trade. But first, a bit about the plots of her two novels...

“Fanny found herself obliged to yield:”
​ the hermeneutics of the cross and the chain in Mansfield Park
A special guest editorial by Aprille Stulti, Ph.D.​

​     “I cannot look out of my dressing-closet without seeing one farmyard, nor walk in the shrubbery without passing another,” Mary Crawford complains in Mansfield Park. Modern readers have often missed or misunderstood Austen's critical stance on the agricultural revolution and the growth of the British empire. On the surface, we see Mary, a quintessential city girl, surprised to find that she is not able to hire a horse and wagon to transport her harp to the parsonage. But a closer interrogation of the text reveals that Jane Austen was working both with and against Mary Crawford’s seeming ignorance of the realities of agricultural life.
    This essay will contend that a close reading of language in Mansfield Park—especially of such seemingly innocuous words such as “survey” and “yield”—reveals Austen’s counter-reaction to agricultural development. Mary Crawford is not merely trying to hire a horse, she is protesting the encroachment of capitalist-based agriculture, which ironically supports the prosperity of her own gentry class. Mary is paradoxically presented as both victim and beneficiary--and finally perpetrator--of imperialist violence.
    This essay will explore how key scenes in Mansfield Park, especially those concerning the amber cross and chain, might adumbrate Austen's resistance to her times... 

    When Jane Austen wrote in Northanger Abbey about book reviewers who "talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans," she wasn't exaggerating. Reviewers in periodicals and journals during this period often expressed their contempt for novels in exactly these terms. 
    Charles Robert Maturin was a writer of gothic novels. But he was also one of the critics who wrote dismissively of sentimental novels and the people who read them and wrote them.
    “The path of novel-writing once laid open was imagined easy by all, and for about forty years the press was deluged with works to which we believe the literary history of no other country could produce a parallel. The milliner’s prentices who had expended their furtive hours, and drenched their maudlin fancies with tales of kneeling lords and ranting baronets at the feet of fair seamstresses, fair as they believed themselves to be, and in narrow back parlours as dark as their own, soon found it easy to stain the well-thumbed pages of a circulating library book with flimsy sentiments, and loose descriptions of their own..."
​       Just like Austen, Maturin wrote a pretty funny parody of this type of novel. Read on for more...