ABSTRACT
In this essay, Elaine Bander explores the evidence of Austen’s letters and fiction to show how she read popular novels with scholarly intensity, reworking Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Lennox, Burney, Smith, Edgeworth, and Radcliffe, to suit her own taste for the ‘natural’ and ‘probable’. Writing against readerly expectations, Austen took the conventional Georgian marriage plot, tested it against her common-sense yardstick, and transformed it in ways that challenge her readers to greater reflection and self-knowledge.
