The Romantic Novel:
Introduction
Outline
• The landscape of fiction in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
• Historical development of the novel
• The importance of Jane Austen and of Sir
Walter Scott
• The place of Maria Edgeworth
The landscape of fiction
• The late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries – the Romantic period – ‘one of the
most fertile, diverse and adventurous periods of
novel-writing in English history. . . . The literary
situation was exceptionally fluid’ (T. Eagleton,
The English Novel (2005), p. 94)
• Diverse forms of fiction: realist novel; Gothic
fiction; romances; epistolary novels; regional
and national tales; the novel of travel, etc.
The landscape of fiction
• The state of fiction in the eighteenth
century: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe and
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels as novels . . .
• Eagleton: ‘the novel starts out as a rather
crude kind of literary form, which can
handle plot (Fielding) or psychology
(Richardson), but not both at the same
time’ (ibid., p. 94)
Historical development of the novel
• The novel a second-class literary form at
the beginning of the Romantic period
• The novel becomes the dominant literary
form shortly after the Romantic period has
ended
• Romantic-era fiction – British fiction in
transition
Historical development of the novel
• The rise of the realist novel like a story told
in a realist novel – movement from disunity
to integration
• Classical realism: e.g. C. Brontë, Jane
Eyre (1847); G. Eliot, Middlemarch (187172)
• The story of the novel a story of the realist
novel’s assimilation and ‘polishing off’ of
the disorder of Romantic-era fiction
Historical development of the novel
• The return of ‘disorder’ largely after the
triumph represented by Middlemarch –
sensation fiction; thrillers; escapist
fantasies, etc.
Jane Austen and Walter Scott
• Pivotal figures within the context of ‘British
fiction in transition’
• Both Tories – in their hands the novel is
transmitted on to becoming dominantbecause-respectable
• Plot (Fielding) + Psychology (Richardson)
= Jane Austen
Jane Austen and Walter Scott
• Austen’s novelistic virtues: narrative
reliability; polished prose; incorporation of
romance into realism (see the moral view
of fiction as ‘falsehood’ or ‘lies’)
• Austen’s work amounts to a call to take
the novel seriously as a literary form
Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818),
vol. 1, ch. 5
• ‘And what are you reading, Miss -?’ ‘Oh! it
is only a novel!’ replies the young lady . . .
or, in short, only some work in which the
greatest powers of the mind are displayed,
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.
Jane Austen and Walter Scott
• Sir Walter Scott – from poet to novelist
• Waverley (1814) – Scott’s first novel and
arguably the single most important work of
fiction in the Romantic era
• Popularity and influence – advocacy of
‘the middle way’ (Waverley indeed!)
Jane Austen and Walter Scott
• Scott uses his position as an influential
novelist to promote Austen’s career –
review of Emma in 1816, Austen similarly
a voice of moderation in relation to the
antagonisms of ‘romance’ and ‘realism’
• The sheer expansiveness of Waverley –
the first ‘historical novel’ – a sign of the
‘polishing off’ work it performs in relation to
preceding fictional forms
Jane Austen and Walter Scott
• Waverley well read in the history of fiction
• Taking history as subject matter in
Waverley – the novel no longer a discourse of ‘falsehood’ or ‘lies’
• The so-called Waverley Novels a monument to the historic crystallization of the
mature realist novel out of the fluidity and
general messiness of the early nineteenthcentury literary situation
The place of Maria Edgeworth
• Castle Rackrent (1800) – a regional novel
based on Irish life (not on any specific
episode within Irish history) – forerunner of
Scott’s historical novel
• Novel and nation – heightened interest in
regionalism after 1707 and in the run-up to
1801
The place of Maria Edgeworth
• Rackrent seems characteristically
‘eighteenth-century’ in that it is not a
novelly novel – more a form of chronicle in
fiction
• Individual characters generally underdeveloped except in the case of the
narrator Thady Quirk
• Novel strongly dependent on the interest
of Quirk’s narrative voice
The place of Maria Edgeworth
• But ‘eighteenth-century’ as Rackrent may
seem, it demonstrates how the Romantic
novel can be seen as a case of fiction in
transition
• The novel form acquires a new seriousness by its interest in history (as opposed
to escapist fantasy)
The place of Maria Edgeworth
• The interest in regionalism betokens how
novel-writing is alive (in Dublin, in Edinburgh) beyond metropolitan London
• There is more to Romantic-era fiction than
just the realist novel’s story of its own
development – i.e. a story of the novel that
is told ‘from below’