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Book review
Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time

by Mary Waldron

Cambridge University Press, 1999

When Jane Austen began writing her novels she entered a world where conservative authors of the day were influenced by popular conduct manuals such as Dr Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774) and Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1798). 

Austen, however, had strong views on the value of popular conduct works and questioned the accepted view that women’s role in society was to conform to the social status quo and the virtues of submission and quietism. 

Her novels did not proclaim an unequivocal moral message; she left readers to reach their own conclusions. Characters were not uniformly good or bad. Her blurring of moral focus was new in fiction and as in real life she presented no perfect solution to the complexities of human experience and relationships. 

Contemporary novelists Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane West were established and successful but Mary Waldron says there is nothing to suggest any unrelieved admiration of any other novelist by Jane Austen in any of her recorded statements. 

In the main part of the book, Mary Waldron examines at length and in great detail each of the novels, the development of characters, their similarity to or difference from the heroes and heroines drawn by contemporary writers. 

This is a very scholarly work which will appeal to serious students of Jane Austen and the novelists of her day. It reads as an academic work and is extensively researched. Waldron backs up her views with detailed examples. 

Mary Waldron is an independent scholar who teaches in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Essex. 

Mary Waite

14 January 2003

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