In an ideal world, this site could be used to make links between Austen’s predecessors and contemporaries, her works, and the adaptations that ensued after her death. For the purpose of displaying the information the creator has collected on Austen’s possible influences and her contemporaries, a list of questions answered with potential authors and texts follows.
English Literature in the 17th, 18th and 19th Century: What Came Before and After Austen
Questions:
- What were Austen’s direct influences reading?
- What influenced them?
- *What did Richardson, Fielding, Johnson, Radcliffe, and Reeve read?
- Threading a narrative between Elizabethan/Jacobean writing, what comes before Cromwell’s Protectorate, how does the Protectorate impacts literary life and through the ban on plays/censorship of writing through to the Restoration and the evolution of writing/censorship/genre/etc…?
Austen’s Female Contemporaries
(need to define popular: popular in pop culture, popular to masses, popular/easy to market…)
Mary Wollstonecraft’s
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
- An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794)
Frances Burney
- Evelina (1778)
- Cecilia (1782)
- Camilla (1796)
Maria Edgeworth
- Castle Rackrent (1800)
- Belinda (Austen would notably have read the 1801/1802 edition first, not the 1810 edition, censored after uproar over the mixed relationships)
Austen’s Male Contemporaries
William Godwin
- Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)
- Memoires of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798)
Other Contemporaries
- Walter Scott’s Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field
- William Cowper’s The Task
- Matthew Lewis (born same year as Austen, died year after Austen) The Monk (1796)
- Edmund Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution
What did Jane Austen read?
Gothic and Pulp fiction
- Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)
- Ann Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797)
- Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778)
Poets
- Pope The Dunciad (1728-1743)
- Cowper’s poetry
Novelists
(may also need to explore the “Trend of Epistolary Novels”)
- Samuel Richardson’s *Pamela* (1740), Clarissa (1748), The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753)
- Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)
- Samuel Johnson! Essays in the Rambler, Idler, Adventurer;Lives of the Poets, Rasselas...His Dictionary
- Laurence SterneTristram Shandy (1759-1767)
- Frances Burney