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The Columbia History of the British NovelJones concludes in Ideas and Innovations: Best-Sellers of -327- Jane Austen's Age that the most popular novelists of the period from 1800 to 1820 were women: Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, Mary Brunton, Jane and Anna Maria Porter, and Sydney Owenson. Only two men are on the list, Walter Scott and Thomas Surr. By 1830, several more women novelists would rival these seven in popularity: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Susan Ferrier, Marguerite Gardiner (Countess of Blessington), Elizabeth Le Noir, and Jane West-and, posthumously, Jane Austen. Historians of the novel, especially those concerned with documenting the "great age of the novel"-the Victorian period-and including feminist literary historians interested in tracing the development of the novel as a female literary tradition, have tended to overlook the significance of this enormous body of female-authored literature. Focusing almost exclusively on Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and a recent addition to the canonical history of the novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, historians of the novel have usually identified the Romantic novel either with a nationalistic and bourgeois recuperation of the past (as in Scott's historical fiction), with an equally conservative celebration of a morally reinvigorated gentry class (in Jane Austen's fiction), or with a Gothic evocation and criticism of the excesses of sensibility (in the work of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley) ...» |
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