"O Leave Novels": Jane Austen, Sir Charles Grandison, Sir Edward Denham, and Rob Mossgiel.

IN 1784, WHEN JANE AUSTEN was just a little girl of eight growing up in her father's lively rectory at Steventon, Robert Burns, an ambitious young man of twenty-four, already enjoyed a local Ayrshire reputation as a poet. Born a generation apart, they were unlikely candidates for literary fame, living as they did, because of gender or class, on the margins of cultured society, but the English country parson's daughter and the Scottish tenant-farmer's son had little else in common except for their limited formal education, enthusiastic reading, comic wit, and unquenchable desire to write. They differed in almost every other respect: nationality, gender, class, politics, religion, temperament, and (conspicuously) sexual experience.

Indeed, 1784 was a landmark year in Burns's impressive career as a lover. After his father's death early that year, Burns and his younger brother Gilbert took a farm at Mossgiel, near Mauchline, in order to support their family of eight. Despite the drudgery of farm labor, Burns found time to get a servant girl with child, for which he was denounced from the pulpit as a fornicator (not for the last time in his short life), (1) and he was about to do the same favor for Jean Armour, the "jewel" of the six "Mauchline Belles" whom he celebrates in "The Belles of Mauchline," a song he wrote that year:

   Miss Miller is fine, Miss Murkland's divine,
      Miss Smith she has wit, and Miss Betty is braw:
   There's beauty and fortune to get wi' Miss Morton,
      But Armour's the jewel for me o' them a'.--(42.5-8)

Jean Armour would bear Burns two more children before they finally married in 1788, and she was in labor with their eighth child when he died, exhausted and in debt, in 1796, the same year that twenty-year-old Jane Austen danced with Tom Lefroy and began writing "First Impressions."

In 1784, however, Burns was still hopeful, energetic, iconoclastic, and full of sexual swagger. In another song he wrote at this period but never published in his lifetime, "O Leave Novels," he impersonates a Lovelace-like seducer of those same Mauchline Belles while, surprisingly, invoking the hackneyed warnings of the eighteenth-century anti-novel moralists:

   O leave novels, ye Mauchline belles,
      Ye're safer at your spinning wheel;
   Such witching books, are baited hooks
      For rakish rooks like Rob Mossgiel.
   Your fine Tom Jones and Grandisons
      They make your youthful fancies reel;
   They heat your brains, and fire your veins,
      And then you're prey for Rob Mossgiel.

   Beware a tongue that's smoothly hung;
      A heart that warmly seems to feel;
   That feelin heart but acks a part,
      'Tis rakish art in Rob Mossgiel.
   The frank address, the soft caress,
      Are worse than poisoned darts of steel,
   The frank address, and politesse,
      Are all finesse in Rob Mossgiel. (43)

This poem reveals three surprising intersections between two writers as different as Burns and Austen. First, Burns repeats the stale libels about the dangers of novel reading that Austen spent her career mocking and refuting. Second, he classifies her favorite novel, Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, along with Fielding's more risque Tom Jones as a lubricious work likely to heat the brains and fire the veins of the Mauchline Belles. Finally, while in his published lyrics and, probably, in his life, Burns was a tender, ardent lover, here he poses as a cynical rake who "acts a part" in order to seduce young women, very like both Richardson's Lovelace and Austen's would-be Lovelace, Sir Edward Denham, in her final, unfinished novel, Sanditon.

Perhaps because of its un-Austen-like anti-novel sentiments, whether ironically intended or not, "O Leave Novels" has received little attention. David Daiches views this "uncharacteristic" poem as an expression of Burns's general frustration and discontent in 1784, blaming the Sassenachs for Burns's rakish posturing: "it is rather an absurd poem, in which the influences are English and 'literary' in the bad sense of that word" (78).

Certainly Burns, far from being the unlettered genius that some of his earliest critics thought him, was strongly influenced in his more pretentious modes by "literary" models available in his school anthology, Arthur Masson's d Collection of English Prose and Verse (Ferguson xlv), the sort of anthology Austen later mocks in Northanger Abbey (37). Burns recounts in an autobiographical letter: "[My earliest] knowledge of modern manners, and of literature and criticism, I got from the Spectator ... [along] with Pope's works, some plays of Shakespear, ... Locke's Essay on the human understanding, [and] a select Collection of English songs ...," adding that, at age seventeen, "I had met with a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Anne's reign, and I poured over them most devoutly." During that difficult year of 1784, he continues, "My reading was only increased by two stray volumes of Pamela, and one of [Smolletts's] Ferdinand Count Fathom, which gave me some idea of Novels" (Letter to Dr. John Moore, 2 August 1787).

"O Leave Novels" is thus "revealing" not only of Burns's unhappy situation in 1784, as Daiches claims (78), but also of the pervasive, culturally-embedded "literary" hostility to the novel genre with which Austen contended, since Burns condemns Grandison based only on his partial reading of Pamela. Perhaps, extrapolating from those two volumes of Pamela, he believed that Sir Charles Grandison would prove to be a rake like Mr. B. (2) Whatever his reasons, however, if liberal-minded Burns, imitating bad English models, could accuse Grandison of pernicious influence, then no novel was above criticism.

For Austen, as for so many writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison was "the" novel, the paradigm according to which their own and others' novels were constructed and judged (Harris, Introd. xxii-xxiii). (3) Family memoirs testify to her admiration of Richardson's last novel. Henry Austen's "Biographical Notice" appended to the first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1817 claims, "Richardson's power of creating, and preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in 'Sir Charles Grandison," gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative" (7). Half a century later, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh added: "Her knowledge of Richardson's works was such as no one is likely again to acquire ... (89). Even without these family witnesses, however, we could infer Austen's assimilation of Grandison from her own writings, most obviously, if unreliably, since the authorship is disputed, in her play Sir Charles Grandison. (4) Brian Southam, the play's modern editor, believes that this piece of juvenilia reveals "Jane Austen's response to Richardson. Her appreciation of his achievement was a fine mixture of admiration and irreverence ..." ("Grandison" 188).

Furthermore, Austen's youthful novel "Jack & Alice" in Volume the First introduces Charles Adams, a burlesque of Sir Charles Grandison. He first appears as a radiant sun god: "The Beams that darted from his Eyes were like those of that glorious Luminary tho' infinitely superior" (18). (5) Like Sir Charles Grandison, Charles Adams inspires passion in female breasts, but he declares, "'I expect nothing more in my wife than my wife will find in me--Perfection'" (26). After breaking several hearts, he marries Lady Williams, who had earlier, "like the great Sir Charles Grandison scorned to deny herself when at Home" (15). Volume the Second's "Evelyn" also contains several allusions to Grandison, as Peter Sabor's edition of the Juvenilia documents (230-40).

Critics have long recognized that many elements in Austen's mature courtship novels echo or revise those in Richardson's Grandison. (6) Like so many authors of her day, she invokes Grandison "as a familiar point of reference, as a touchstone by which other works may be tried" (Harris, Introd. xiv). These allusions occur most notably in Northanger Abbey when Catherine Morland responds to Isabella Thorpe's assumption that "'Mrs. Morland objects to novels'":

"No, she does not. She very often reads Sir Charles Grandison herself, but new books do not fall in our way."

"Sir Charles Grandison! That is an amazing horrid book, is it not?--I remember Miss Andrews could not get through the first volume."

"It is not like Udolpho at all; but yet I think it is very entertaining." (41-42)

Significantly, Catherine enjoys both Grandison, the old-fashioned conduct novel, and Udolpho, the sensational new "horrid" novel by Ann Radcliffe, with almost equal enthusiasm. So did the Austens. Jane Austen boasted in one letter to Cassandra that her family were "great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so ..." (18-19 December 1798), and in another, she described how her clergyman father relished the Gothic tale The Midnight Bell (24 October 1798).

Northanger Abbey also contains Austen's spirited "'only a novel!'" defense of novel reading and novel writing in defiance of "the common cant" (37-38). Here Austen first acknowledges that some of the harshest critics of novels are themselves novelists "degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding--joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works ... (37). Ironically, both Burney and Edgeworth, the two authors whose novels she praises here, had labeled their own novels "works" rather than expose them to critical disdain by classifying them as "novels." (7) Austen, in contrast, courageously admits to being one of that injured body whose performances "have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them" (NA 37).

Such boasts were Austen's response to a tradition of novel-bashing older than the genre. At least as far back as Plato's time moralists have been suspicious of imaginative literature, and poets from Sidney to Shelley have defended their art against accusations of untruth and immorality. As the English novel developed throughout the eighteenth century, it borrowed both the critical vocabulary and the defensive strategies of the older genres, claiming, as rhetoric, poetry, and drama had done before, to instruct as well as to delight--or more precisely, to delight in order to instruct. But the danger remained that some readers might be delighted without being instructed, or worse, might learn the wrong lessons from ambiguous fictions. Some critics like Vicesimus Knox, the prolific compiler of Elegant Extracts, blamed the work rather than the reader: "I cannot help thinking, that the effect which a literary work is found to produce, is the best criterion of its merit; and that sentiment or feeling, after all that has been urged by theoretical criticism, is the ultimate and infallible touchstone to appreciate with precision the works of taste and genius" (1.128).

While some moralist-critics like Knox thus judged novels by their effect on the behavior of vulnerable (that is, young and female) readers, condemning novels for allegedly inappropriate responses by naive readers, novelists like Defoe and Richardson hectored readers on their responsibilities, claiming that their own novels were morally exemplary works which readers had to learn to read appropriately. (8) In 1719, for example, Defoe attempted to disarm critics in his Preface to Robinson Crusoe: "The story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them (viz.) to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will" (3). In effect, Defoe claims the same didactic purpose for his novel as he does for his many political and religious pamphlets and conduct books. He followed his novel with Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), in which he reiterates that "the end and design of the whole work ... is calculated for, and dedicated to, the improvement and instruction of mankind in the ways of virtue and piety ..." (xv), claiming in the persona of Crusoe that "the fable is always made for the moral, not the moral for the fable" (ix). Strategically Defoe turns tables on anti-novel critics in his "Essay Upon Honesty" in Serious Reflections by insisting on the reader's responsibility to infer the correct moral lessons: "sincerity is required in the reader; and he that reads this essay without honesty, will never understand it right.... If prejudice, partiality, or private opinions stand in the way, the man's a reading Knave, he is not honest to the subject; and upon such an one all the labour is lost ..." (24-25).

Defoe worked even harder to market Moll Flanders (1722) as a moral work, claiming in his Preface, first, that the story; like that of Crusoe, was true; second, that he had painstakingly cleaned up Moll's lewd diction so "as not to give room, especially for vicious readers to turn it to his Disadvantage"; and third, that if readers get it wrong, they have only themselves to blame, since "[a]ll possible Care . .. has been taken to give no leud Ideas, no immodest Turns in the new dressing up this Story ...; what is left 'tis hop'd will not offend the chastest Reader, or the modestest Hearer; and as the best use is made even of the worst Story, the Moral 'tis hop'd will keep the Reader serious, even where the Story might incline him to be otherwise ..." (1-2). Finally; Defoe insists that if readers enjoy the "criminal Part" more than the "penitent Part," so much the worse for the readers: "indeed it is too true that the difference lyes not in the real worth of the Subject so much as in the Gust and Palate of the Reader" (2).

Twenty years later Richardson also claimed that his novels were both true and instructive. Beginning with the phenomenal success of Pamela (1740-1741), he sought to direct his readers' judgment, repeatedly asserting that his dual purpose in writing Pamela was "to Divert and Entertain, and at the same time to Instruct, and Improve the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes" (Preface 3). His Postscript to Clarissa claims that the novel is intended "to inculcate upon the human mind, under the guise of an amusement, the greatest lessons of Christianity" (1495). Despite Richardson's best attempts to shore up his narrative with buttresses of instruction, however, his psychological realism required complex, morally ambiguous characters, and his epistolary form led to "every one putting him and herself into the Character they read, and judging of it by their own Sensations" (Letter to Lady Echlin, 10 October 1754). Inevitably, some readers misread the message of Clarissa, as Richardson lamented to a young correspondent: "O that I could not say that I have met with more Admirers of Lovelace than of Clarissa" (Letter to Frances Grainger, 21 December 1749). Later Richardson confessed to another young correspondent that, while creating Lovelace, he "had Thoughts of burning the Ms. for fear of doing Mischief by his Character" (Letter to Sarah Chapone, 25 March 1751).

Richardson had even greater misgivings about the moral tendencies of Fielding's Tom Jones, warning readers in his "Concluding Note" to Grandison of the danger of bestowing a "happy" ending upon a "vicious" character, a danger he had resisted with Lovelace: "Is not vice crowned with success, triumphant, and rewarded, and perhaps set off with wit and spirit, a dangerous representation? And is it not made even more dangerous by the hasty reformation, introduced, in contradiction to all probability, for the sake of patching up what is called a happy ending?" (4066).

With Grandison, Richardson was determined to avoid such dangerous ambiguity. As Harris explains, "Sir Charles" Grandison was the book that Richardson had no desire to write.... [H]is growing conviction, corroborated by the acclaim for Tom Jones', that even the 'restorations' had failed to convert a naughty world at last drove him to contemplate another full-scale work" (Introd. vii). Richardson's most morally didactic novel was thus constructed as a fictionalized conduct book, and its hero, the exemplary "good man" Sir Charles Grandison, was meant to portray "a Man acting uniformly well thro' a Variety of trying Scenes, because all his Actions are regulated by one steady Principle: A Man of Religion and Virtue; of Liveliness and Spirit; accomplished and agreeable; happy in himself, and a blessing to others ..." (Preface 4). Again Richardson insists that his primary purpose in writing Grandison is to instruct rather than to entertain: "From what has been premised, it may be supposed, that the present Collection is not published ultimately, not even principally, any more than the other two for the Sake of Entertainment only. A much nobler End is in View" (Preface 4). This noble end of moral improvement is served by frequent narrative debates on issues such as filial duty, parental authority, marital responsibilities, public versus private life, wit versus wisdom, the morality of dueling, courtship protocols, and so on.

But Richardson was far too good a novelist to be entirely reader-proof. The character of Sir Charles's witty sister Charlotte, for example, may be too complex to be exemplary, prompting Richardson, like Defoe before him, to extract his moral lessons from the ambiguous context of his fiction (Harris, Introd. xxi). When Burns calls Grandison, like Tom Jones, one of the "baited hooks/For rakish rooks," he confirms the worst nightmares of Richardson, who fretted throughout his career lest readers, persuaded by the eloquence of characters speaking in their own voices, misconstrue the morals of his novels.

Burns's stance in "O Leave Novels," then, reflects a prevailing affective aesthetic that judged literary works not by their formal excellencies but by their moral effects on readers--an attitude that Austen characteristically mocks in the final sentence of Northanger Abbey: "I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience" (252). From an early age, Austen recognized that different people would read the same novel differently. In her novels, reading taste both reveals character and reflects values: thus the taste to appreciate and enjoy Grandison or Camilla marks a character's reflective, principled mind, while Austen's own complex, "mixed" characters both test and testify to her own readers' mettle. She certainly shared Richardson's interest in how her readers would respond, but unlike Richardson, she did not attempt to control their responses; rather, she anticipated their diverse reactions and was interested to see what they revealed about her readers, as her "Opinions" of Mansfield Park and Emma clearly show (MW 431-39).

Burns's attitude, however, was more common than Austen's. Even some critics who admired the writings of Fielding and Richardson expressed anxiety about their "tendencies." The radical William Godwin claimed that "the actual effect [a work] is calculated to produce upon the reader ... cannot he completely ascertained but by experiment" (186). He denied, however, that books were "corrupters of" the morals of mankind," arguing that "[e]very tiling depends upon the spirit in which [they] are read" (135). Nevertheless he recognized the difficulties Richardson faced in creating an exemplary character like Sir Charles, observing that Richardson "has drawn in Lovelace and Grandison models of a debauched and of an elevated character. Neither of them is eminently calculated to produce imitation; but it would not perhaps be adventurous to affirm that more readers have wished to resemble Lovelace, than have wished to resemble Grandison" (141).

One reader who "wished to resemble Lovelace" is Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon, who

   had read more sentimental Novels than agreed with him. His fancy
   had been early caught by all the impassioned, & most exceptionable
   parts of Richardsons; & such Authors as have since appeared to
   tread in Richardson's steps, so far as Man's determined pursuit of
   Woman in defiance of every opposition of feeling & convenience is
   concerned, had since occupied the greater part of his literary
   hours, & formed his Character.... He felt that he was formed to be
   a dangerous Man--quite in the line of the Lovelaces. (404-05)

Austen, however, ascribes Sir Edward's faults not to the books that he reads but rather to the perverse way in which he (mis)reads them: "his not having by Nature a very strong head" leads him to overlook the "absurdities" of a Lovelace, "& with the same ill-luck which made him derive only false Principles from Lessons of Morality, & incentives to Vice from the History of it's Overthrow, he gathered only hard words & involved sentences from the style of our most approved Writers" (404-05). As Barker demonstrates, Sir Edward is a satire of "the traditional didactic theory of the novel that dominates eighteenth-century criticism" (Barker 151).

Sir Edward assures the heroine, Charlotte Heywood, "'I am no indiscriminate Novel-Reader. The mere Trash of the common Circulating Library, I hold in the highest contempt'" (403), thus echoing the "common cant" of John Thorpe, who boasts pretentiously in Northanger Abbey, "'I never read novels; I have something else to do'" (48). (9) When Sir Edward describes the sort of novel he does like to read, he clearly has Clarissa in mind, although in his fevered misreading, he transforms Richardson's villain into a sublime hero: "'T'were Pseudo-Philosophy to assert that we do not feel more enwraped by the brilliancy of his Career, than by the tranquil & morbid Virtues of any opposing Character'" (404). Like Burns in "O Leave Novels," Sir Edward aspires to the "rakish art" and "finesse" of Lovelace--although due to his limited purse, the object of his seduction, Clara Brereton (whose very name suggests a pocket version of Clarissa), must suffer "the quietest sort of ruin & disgrace"

Significantly, Sir Edward also admires the transgressive genius of Burns. In Sanditon Austen returns to some of the themes of the earlier Northanger Abbey: the focus on reading disorders, the satire of critical jargon, the assorted characters gathered at a watering-place, and the exposure of selfish, hypocritical egotism. Sanditon's heroine Charlotte Heywood is, however, a shrewder, more confident observer than young Catherine Morland.(10) At first the jargon-spouting Sir Edward impresses Charlotte, but she quickly sees through his intellectual pretensions as she sees through everyone's:

   He began, in a tone of great Taste & Feeling, to talk of the Sea &
   the Sea shore--& ran with Energy through all the usual Phrases
   employed in praise of their Sublimity, & descriptive of the
   undescribable Emotions they excite in the Mind of Sensibility....
   All were eagerly & fluently touched;--rather commonplace
   perhaps--but doing very well from the Lips of a handsome Sir
   Edward,--and she [c.sup.d] not but think him a Man of Feeling--till
   he began to stagger her by the number of his Quotations, & the
   bewilderment of some of his sentences. (396)

Silly Sir Edward cites Burns as his literary hero:

"But while we are on the subject of Poetry, what think you Miss H. of Burns Lines to his Mary?--Oh! there is Pathos to madden one!--If ever there was a Man who felt, it was Burns.... I confess my sence of his Pre-eminence Miss H.--If Scott has a fault, it is the want of Passion.... But Burns is always on fire.--His Soul was the Altar in which lovely Woman sat enshrined, his Spirit truly breathed the immortal Incence which is her Due.--" (397)

Charlotte's response suggests that Austen shares Charlotte's conventional disapproval of Burns the man, if not Burns the poet:

"I have read several of Burn's Poems with great delight, said Charlotte as soon as she had time to speak, but I am not poetic enough to separate a Man's Poetry entirely from his Character;-& poor Burns's known Irregularities, greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his Lines.--I have difficulty in depending on the Truth of his Feelings as a Lover. I have not faith in the sincerity of the affections of a Man of his Description. He felt & he wrote & he forgot." (397-98) (11)

Clearly, then, Sir Edward reads Burns about as badly as Burns read Richardson.

Burns, of course, had been dead for over a decade before Austen anonymously broke into print with the publication of Sense and Sensibility in 1811. Nor do we have any evidence that Austen was interested in Burns's songs, for while she enjoyed playing popular songs on her Broadwood forte-piano, she apparently preferred Dibdin's to Burns's (Piggot 315-16). Characters in her novels occasionally play or sing Italian and Irish airs, but rarely the Scottish songs that Burns contributed to The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803) and George Thompson's A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (1790). Nor does Austen mention Burns in any surviving letters.

Nevertheless, Burns's "'known Irregularities,'" as Charlotte calls them, both poetical and sexual, were hotly debated in the literary quarterlies during Austen's final decade of life (Southam, Guide 159-60). Austen might thus have read Francis Jeffrey's unsigned review of Cromek's Reliques of Robert Burns (1808) in the first number of The Edinburgh Review in 1808, or Scott's unsigned review of the same work a year later in The Quarterly Review, or even an 1805 article by Mrs. Lefroy's brother, Sanmel Egerton Brydges, included in his Censura Literaria (1815). In the latter work, Brydges compares Burns favorably to Austen's beloved Cowper, arguing that Burns's undeniable "imprudences" and "immoralities" should not detract from his genius nor his essential goodness of heart (169-73). (12) In the decade after his death, Burns was still very much in the news, and still controversial.

In Sanditon, Austen invokes her idea of Burns, much as Burns invoked his of Richardson, as an anti-Grandison Lovelace-like figure in order to show how Sir Edward Denham learns only hard words and bad morality from "our most approved Writers." When Sir Edward vigorously defends the passionate poet's right to transcend common morality, using the same diction that he enlisted to defend Lovelace's transgressions, he is clearly over the top: "'It were Hyper-criticism, it were Pseudo-philosophy to expect from the soul of high toned Genius, the grovellings of a common mind.--The Coruscations of Talent, elicited by impassioned feeling in the breast of Man, are perhaps incompatible with some of the prosaic Decencies of Life'" (398). In praising Burns, therefore, Sir Edward condemns himself as surely as Isabella Thorpe does in criticizing Sir Charles Grandison, or John Thorpe when he dismisses Camilla as a "'stupid book'" (49).

From Northanger Abbey to Sanditon, Jane Austen wrote novels "in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language" (NA 38). Her novels challenge readers to rethink novel conventions and to judge people and events in fiction as carefully as they must judge them in their own lives. Far from impairing a young lady's virtue, in fact, Austen's novels encourage careful observation and reflection and hone autonomous moral judgment. Had those six Mauchline Belles read her novels, they might have been safe from Rob Mossgiel.

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NOTES

(1.) See "A Poet's Welcome To His Love-Begotten Daughter" (1784): "Tho' now they ca' me Fornicator,/ ... Welcome! My bonie, sweet wee Dochter, / Tho' ye come here a wee unsought for" (60) as well as "The Fornicator" (1784).

(2.) I thank Jocelyn Harris for pointing out that Burns might not have been completely mistaken about Sir Charles Grandison, for in response to Lady Bradshaigh's request that Grandison "assume the dress and address of the rake" (Letter to Lady Bradshaigh [1750?], 170), Richardson gives Harriet Byron the following speech: "Did you think of your brother Lady G, when you once said, that the man who would commend himself to the general favour of us young women, should be a Rake in his address, and a Saint in his heart?" (Grandison 6.92-93).

(3.) But see also Copeland: "What Jane Austen and her contemporaries owe most to Grandison is paradoxically what they were most unable to take: Sir Charles's unswerving confidence in the family as a symbol of universal order" (98).

(4.) The descendants of James Austen who possessed the manuscript believed that the play, composed in Jane Austen's handwriting, had in fact been dictated by young Anna Austen, James's daughter, to her Aunt Jane. Southam, however, argues for Jane as author, both on textual evidence and on the grounds that a child young enough to have to dictate a composition was too young to compose such a lengthy text in her head (8-10).

(5.) See Harris (Art 228-38); Sabor (n. 5, 13); Doody (Introd. xxvii-xxviii and Explanatory Notes passim).

(6.) See Bradbrook (86-87, 96); Harris, (Introd. xxiii and Art passim but especially 222-38); Southam ("Men" 79-86); Perry (142, 146, 155, 250-51); Waldron (42, 114).

(7.) See Burney's "Advertisement" to Camilla, "The Author of this little Work ..." (5), and Edgeworth's "Advertisement" to Belinda: "The following work is offered to the public as a Moral Tale--the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel" (3).

(8.) Preston gives a thorough account, to which I am obviously indebted here, of the long process by which the great eighteenth-century novelists formed their readers.

(9.) Southam observes, "'Trash' takes us directly to Northanger Abbey, which JA was revising in the second half of 1816" (Guide 162).

(10.) See Bander (195-96) and Benedict and Le Faye (lxi). A number of critics have recognized that Charlotte's role in this fragment is essentially to "read" other characters: Bander (196-97), Barker (159), Duckworth (218), and McMaster (152); but see also Ford: "Charlotte Heywood ... is herself caught up in the shaping fancies of novelistic design" (182).

(11.) This passage suggests that Austen may have read, or read of, James Currie's The Works of Robert Burns, with an account of his life (1800). Burns's twentieth-century editor J. De Lancey Ferguson laments that "the writing of Burns's life and the editing of his works was, for a full century after his death, in the hands of men temperamentally unfitted to sympathize with certain phases of his character," adding that Currie in particular was "a man timidly orthodox in politics and religion, fanatical in his aversion to alcohol, almost without personal acquaintance with Burns, and wholly without editorial experience" (liv). See also Southam (Guide 160).

(12.) Harris speculates that Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges may have served as model for Sir Walter Elliot (Revolution 186), as does Bradbrook (136), who also identifies both Mr. Collins and Sir Edward Denham as satires of Brydges (134-36). In addition, Bradbrook suggests that Brydges's novel Mary de Clifford (1792) may have influenced Austen's Pride and Prejudice (126-32).

Elaine Bander, who has served JASNA as Vice President (Publications), JASNA-Canada President, Regional Coordinator of Montreal-Quebec City, Travelling Scholar, and member of the Persuasions Editorial Board, is a frequent AGM speaker. She is currently writing a book on Austen's negotiation of novelistic conventions.