novels he sought to make the differing versions of Scottish history mutually intelli-
gible to their inheritors, using a new relativistic historical and anthropological
approach to reconcile sectarian traditions, so that a Scotland who understood herself
could be known to England. Scott was a patriot and a Unionist.
The greatest commercial success of ‘the Wizard of the North’ was, however,
Ivanhoe: A Romance, the first of the English romances which succeeded his Scottish
novels.Ivanhoefilled the yawning gap indicated by the words The Middle Ages.
People in 1819 had no idea what life in the Middle Ages might have been like. After
Ivanhoe, they had a detailed and moving picture of it, an idea which is still popular.
Scott’s conception of narrative was essentially theatrical, and five versions of his new
romance were put on stage in London in 1820. Having patented the historical novel,
he had now created the costume-drama industry which fuelled European opera, and
declined into well-upholstered tales of love, then into ‘bodice-rippers’, and also (via
R.L. Stevenson) the boys’ adventure story, and the thousands of ‘historical’ films
burlesqued in Monty Pythonand Blackadderbut still going strong in fantasies about
the deeds of William Wallace and the private lives of Tudor monarchs. In Scott’s
English medieval pageants, drawn from reading rather than local knowledge, the use
of theatrically posed scenes, as of Flora MacIvor at the waterfall, loses both irony and
Scottish iron. His popularity and reputation eventually faded, and his generosity of
style means that he seems long-winded compared with his snappier imitators. The
success ofIvanhoe and its declining sequels should not conceal the achievement of
the author ofWav e r l e y, a historical novelist of range, grasp and balance. The inven-
tion of a form of fiction featuring real historical characters in a plausible setting was
a permanent accession to the human imagination.Jane Austen
Jane Austen(1775–1817) gre w up in the quiet country parish of her father, the Rev.
George Austen, in a family where literature was the chief amusement. One of her five
elder brothers became her father’s curate and successor. She wrote for pleasure in
childhood, and as an adult chose to work on ‘3 or 4 families in a country village’: the
world she knew. Her wit, workmanship and background are not Romantic but
Augustan and 18th-century Anglican, like the ideals of the older country gentry she
depicts.
Despite its sudden spring in the mid-18th century, the novel became a major
form again only after 1800. Before Austen, there were Gothic tales, novels of sensi-
bility like Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, the social entertainments of Fanny
Burney and Charlotte Smith, and Godwin’s experiments of ideas, but the novel
reached perfection with Jane Austen. It went on to popularity, periodical publica-
tion, and bigger things.‘A nd what are you reading Miss —?’ ‘Oh, it is only a novel’, replies the young lady; while
she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. – ‘It is only
Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; 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 effusion of wit and humour
are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.Thus Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.(Cecilia and Camilla are nove ls by Fanny
Burney;Belinda, a novel by Maria Edgeworth.)
In her brilliant fragment,Love and Freindship (sic), the 14-year-old Austen mocks250 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837
Jane Austen(1775–1817)
Born at Steventon,
Hampshire. 1801 Moved to
Bath. 1806 Moved to
Southampton. 1809 Moved
to Chawton, Hampshire.
1817 Died at Winchester.
Novels, in order of
composition (with publication
dates): Sense and Sensibility
(1811), Northanger Abbey
(1818), Pride and Prejudice
(1813), Mansfield Park
(1814), Emma (1816),
Persuasion (1818).