Jane Austen and Her Time

It used to be said that Jane Austen was utterly unknown and unread during her lifetime. It was then discovered, however, that the concept of the isolated and unacknowledged genius at work in a cultural desert contained, let us say, elements of exaggeration; and it is now fashionable to inflate her contemporary prominence and achievement.

Mary Lascelles has referred to Jane Austen’s ‘steadily growing success’; Margaret Kennedy has affirmed that ‘the books had a mild success’; Charles Beecher Hogan has insisted that ‘her novels were very dear to her: she wanted them to succeed, and they did succeed’; and B. C. Southam has stressed that ‘the novels were relatively successful during her lifetime’.

I want in this paper to relate Jane Austen’s achievement to that of some of her contemporaries; success is, of course, relative and a context is needed to render it meaningful. So 1814 is to be seen not only as the year of Mansfield Park, but also that of Scott’s Waverley, Byron’s The Corsair, Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer, and Lady Sydney Morgan’s O’Donnell.