Very often, when reading old novels, I come across some striking passage when the author or authoress, or one of their characters, delivers their strong views about something, such as slavery or empire or women's rights.  I've long since realized that Jane Austen was not outspoken about any of these issues, compared to her peers. I conclude that people who think she was outspoken or radical have not read enough of the popular literature of the time to have a basis for comparison. 
    But if I bang on that drum every time I review an old novel, I'll sound like a broken record. (ooh, mixed metaphors).  So I've  excerpted these three examples about feminism from novels I've recently read, to present them together. The first two are examples of feminists--okay, tragic, doomed, feminists, but they are given the chance to have their say. The third is a speech from a "mixed character," someone presented as flawed, but essentially good.
    The feminist message is delivered not by the heroine, but by a side character. Then it is made clear to us that this side character may be sympathetic, but is not entirely admirable.
​     The word "subversive" is widely used in academia these days, often when arguing that the author has a message which she barely hints at, but i think introducing feminism in this way is truly subversive...

CMP#193    The "novel-reading miss": Ellen and Julia (1793)  
​   The next few books, I think, all mention novel-reading, if only in passing. In her famous defense of the novel in Northanger Abbey, Austen wrote of the novelists who disparage novels in the pages of their own novels, "joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust."
    Here is a prime example: Sensible Julia “selected such books only as could improve, and admired no characters, but such as placed virtue in its most amiable light, and was equally free from the absurdities of romance, or the pernicious follies delineated in modern Novels." Her sister Ellen grows up reading novels and wants to be a romantic heroine.
    That's a big reason why I am reading and sharing information about these forgotten books--the fun of connecting them to Austen and placing Austen's works in the context of the time they were written. Scholar Susan Allen Ford, speaking on the Jane Austen Society podcast, speaks of the pleasure of finding relevant items in other novels: "I was always making little discoveries... They certainly give you an insight into Austen's playful mind... You can read Austen forever without knowing any of this, but once you do, it just adds these extra layers of complexity but also extra layers of pleasure."
    Ellen and Julia is a novel full of unrealistic coincidences and several incredibly fortunate inheritances, but the message of the novel is supposedly: beware of the insidious effects of novel-reading, or you’ll end up like Ellen!
      The novel is typical in that a slender narrative is stretched out with unconnected and lengthy backstories--in this case, the backstories of fairly minor characters. (This technique is known as the "inset narrative, more about that below).   
​     These backstories have a moral purpose because they illustrate some fault or vice and the miserable consequences thereof...

     I’ll Consider of It! is a strange book, but it’s a refreshing change of pace from all the deadly serious, “virtue under threat” novels that I’ve been reading lately. I should have thought of this sooner—the way to get away from stories where the plot impetus revolves around the chastity of the heroine, is to switch to comedic novels. Jane Austen, for example, wrote comedy.
     Of course, dramatic novels contained some comic leavening, usually provided by a garrulous servant who speaks with a regional accent. And comic authors still inveighed against the follies of the times. The anonymous author of I’ll Consider of It!! weighs in on a lot of topics, such as female education, boarding schools, animal cruelty, unhealthy corseting, and uncharitable people, but it is an essentially light-hearted novel. It was written in imitation of a fabulously successful book which had come out the year before, titled Thinks I to Myself. The narrator and characters keep repeating '"I'll consider of it!" on every other page, which gets tiresome. But the odd thing it, the narrator of I’ll Consider of It frequently interrupts himself to take a poke at Thinks I To Myself. I’ll get back to the strange relationship between TITM and ICoI later.
   First, let’s meet our heroine, Charlotte Clarkson, who lives with her maternal grandfather, General Littlefame, and her widowed mother. The family are neither wealthy nor of high status, but the author arranged that Mrs. Clarkson fortuitously won five thousand pounds in the lottery, which is enough to get by with a single servant and to send Charlotte to a good boarding school. Mrs. Clarkson has high hopes for her lovely daughter…

   The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliff, the queen of Gothic novels, is one of the two books which Harriet Smith recommended to Robert Martin in Emma, the other being The Children of the Abbey. Emma Woodhouse makes a fanciful connection between Harriet, a girl of illegitimate parentage, and a typically friendless and dispossessed novel heroine such as Adeline of The Romance of the Forest. It is this connection which causes Emma to fantasize that Harriet must be from genteel stock and should marry accordingly--which means she shouldn't marry Robert Martin.
   However, the Gothic plot of The Romance of the Forest (abandoned abbey, a chest with a skeleton in it, a bloody dagger, secret passages) bears no resemblance to the prosaic doings of the little village of Highbury.  Susan Allen Ford points out that Donwell Abbey, set in the English countryside under a sun bright, without being oppressive, bears no resemblance to a half-ruined abbey in a Gothic novel. The heroine Adeline is a beautiful, virtuous, and accomplished girl who shows more resolution and courage when faced with danger than Harriet did in her encounter with the gypsies.
​    But I want to discuss a minor character in Radcliffe's novel named Annette... a very minor character...