ABSTRACT
Anyone who turns to this volume for critical illumination is likely to be disappointed. In many respects the birth and growth of Jane Austen’s critical reputation was a dull and long-drawn-out affair. The contemporary reviews are pedestrian and the later nineteenth-century criticism is unenlivened by disputes or by infectious enthusiasm. Nor are there those moments of insight which occur when one great mind is engaged by another—as when Johnson writes on Pope, Blake on Milton, or Coleridge on Shakespeare. Jane Austen’s novels have never commanded such a level of attention, such a degree of imaginative empathy. There are no masterpieces of criticism in this volume. That said, however, there are certain, limited claims to be made on behalf of the material collected here. The case of Jane Austen is more than that of a single author. Her novels revealed to the early nineteenth-century reading public that fiction was capable of unsuspected power, that it was to be taken seriously as a form of literature, and that criticism of the novel could itself be a serious intellectual activity. In this respect the documentation of Jane Austen’s contemporary reputation is important to our understanding of the rise of the novel in critical esteem.
