In the novel Emma, the subject of novels comes up when Emma Woodhouse asks Harriet Smith about Robert Martin's reading habits. Emma thinks the young farmer is not good enough for her friend Harriet. She asks Harriet, “Mr. Martin, I suppose, is not a man of information beyond the line of his own business? He does not read?" Note that Emma phrases the question in the negative. She's expecting to have her prejudices confirmed.
   There's a bit of subtle humour too, because surely Emma is asking about serious reading--politics and philosophy and history--but Harriet thinks only of novels and the Elegant Extracts (a sort of Readers Digest Condensed Books of the day). She mentions two potboilers: ​"He never read The Romance of the Forest, nor The Children of the Abbey.  He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can.”
    We never learn if Robert Martin ever get a copy of Regina Maria Roche’s lengthy gothic romance novel, The Children of the Abbey, but it was a best-seller. A synopsis published one hundred years after its publication, describes it thus: "The motherless Amanda is the heroine; and she encounters all the vicissitudes befitting the heroine of the three-volume novel. These include the necessity of living under an assumed name, of becoming the innocent victim of slander, of losing a will [that is, the will hidden from her by her evil stepmother], refusing the hands of dukes and earls, and finally, with her brother, overcoming her enemies, and living happy in the highest society forever after. The six hundred pages, with the high-flown gallantry, the emotional excesses, and the reasonless catastrophes of the eighteenth-century novel, fainting heroines, lovelorn heroes, oppressed innocence and abortive schemes of black-hearted villainy, form a fitting accompaniment to the powdered hair, muslin gowns, stage-coaches, postilions, and other picturesque accessories.”
      It’s a long book with a lot of twists and turns, so I'll stick to the highlights and some recurring themes and tropes. The villains "are completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them," to use Jane Austen's words, and the heroine sheds a lot of tears along the way...

    Well, lately we’ve had novel after novel which focusses on heroines guarding their chastity at all costs.  There were some other implicit values for female behaviour, and they feature in the following two novels, one of which Austen read, and another she might have read. These strictures are: (1) never complain about your husband and (2) never, ever confess your love to a man before he's said he loves you.
    Susan, a novel, author unknown, was published in 1809 by J. Booth. Scholars surmise that the appearance of this novel spurred Jane Austen to write the publisher Benjamin Crosby, who had purchased the manuscript of her novel Susan to ask him, when was he going to publish her novel? He, or rather his son Richard, replied that they owned the manuscript, they were under no obligation to publish it, and she could have the rights back by refunding the ten pounds she'd received for the manuscript. The matter rested for a few years more until Henry Austen, Jane's brother, paid the ten pounds and then informed Crosby that the manuscript he had spurned was by the author of the well-received novels Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.
​   So we might expect that Jane Austen at least looked at the novel Susan. She also changed the name of her heroine from Susan to Catherine. But her novel was not published until after her death, as Northanger Abbey.
    But first, let's look at a novel which we're pretty sure Austen read, because she joked about it in another one of her letters: Margiana, or Widdrington Tower (1808), by Mrs. Sykes.

​          My latest article in Jane Austen's Regency World magazine (Jan/Feb 2024 issue) concerns the novel First Impressions by Margaret Holford. As devoted Janeites know, First Impressions was Austen's original title for Pride and Prejudice, and it's generally thought she changed the title because Holford's novel came out first, in 1801. ​Perhaps, having heard of the novel, Austen got her hands on a copy, to see how it compared with her own unpublished work. I think there are indications in Pride and Prejudice that Austen indeed read and drew some inspiration from First Impressions. For that matter, astute Janeites will spot a slight similarity between the opening of the novel, which I quoted above, and the opening of another Austen novel. But I won't take that up in this post. Instead, here's a plot synopsis. You'll see that this novel continues our theme of girls who must fight to preserve their virtue. The titillation of the tale arises from the perils to which Maria is exposed, and the moral lessons arise from the lengths to which our heroine will go to preserve her virgin honour.
​      Holford's First Impressions is a four volume novel, and although the action drags a bit in the middle as we suffer along with the heroine through her various vicissitudes, I have to say it starts out with a bang--Holford wastes no time in setting up her heroine to be both penniless and friendless. Her plight is not a very good reflection on the foresight of her late guardian, Madame de Vaublanc, when it comes to estate planning. We have to assume that good old lady didn’t realize her cousin and executor was dishonest and corrupt, although the fact that his name is “Gripe” should have tipped off any cautious woman...

    In previous blog posts, I discussed a sub-genre of novel called the “season” novel. This genre was invented by Thomas Skinner Surr in his A Winter in London (1806), which was such a huge mega-hit with its thinly-disguised portraits of real aristocrats and London celebrities, that many imitators followed, such as A Summer at Weymouth (1808) and A Season at Harrowgate (1817). This post is about A Winter in Bath, by an anonymous author, but I didn’t read this 1807 novel because it’s a “season” novel. A Winter in Bath deserves attention for a few other reasons:

• Adriana, the heroine, is troubled by the unwanted attentions of young Mr. Dawson, who is very much a John Thorpe (Northanger Abbey) type of character.
• The publisher, Benjamin Crosby, threatened to sue another publisher who brought out a book called A Winter at Bath at the same time, a dispute which spilled over to the newspapers and the review columns.
• A Winter in Bath is tied to the mystery over the authorship of The Woman of Colour, the unusual 1803 novel which features a “mulatto” heiress as its main character. More about that later.
• There is an Emma-like reference which might be interesting to Janeites. Mrs. Elton, the daughter of a Bristol trader in Emma, boasts that she has “resources within herself” which enable her to live in obscurity in the small village of Highbury. In A Winter in Bath, we have a minor character, Mr. Oakley. He was a prosperous Bristol trader who retires and moves to live like a gentleman in the country. But he misses his old life because he’s not interested in hunting or field sports and intellectually, he is: “[d]estitute of resources, with no taste for any intellectual or refined amusement….”
• This novel features a lesbian couple as minor characters. Have we got your attention now, modern academy?

    I've read almost one hundred novels of the long 18th century, I'd place this one higher on the list than many others...