Fashionable Sensibilities, Female Pathology and the Consumption of Novels: Jane Austen's Women Readers in the Contact Zone

In a famous quote from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the narrator imagines a young woman’s reaction at being asked what she is reading: “‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame”. While Austen’s scene is placed in the context of one of the most fervent 19th-century defences of the literary and moral dignity of novels, the young lady depicted here appears deeply aware of the negative stereotypes associated with the figure of the woman reader. In Samuel-Auguste Tissot's Essay on Diseases Incident to Literary and Sedentary Persons, translated into English in 1769, we read that “of all the circumstances hurtful to women, the chief has been the innumerable collection of novels published within these hundred years”. Similarly, for leading medical theorists such as Thomas Beddoes in Britain and Benjamin Rush in the (newly born) United States, novels act on the female body as agents of both physiological and moral corruption, straining the delicate nerves of women and perverting their ‘natural’ social role as companions of men. Mingling together the culture of fashionable sensibility, the medical and moral-philosophical discourse deployed to describe female pathology and the literary value of novels, the figure of the 19th-century woman reader appears as a fascinating case for the exploration of the contact zone between authoritative and literary discourse. Like other luxury products that had become widely available in the course of the 18th century, also novels were an integral part of the consumer society that seemed to both refine and weaken middle-class women. By focusing on the complex nexus of ideas and images that were used to represent the 19th-century woman reader, this chapter attempts to show that Austen’s fiction engages with this cultural discourse by exploring the potentialities inherent in the refinement offered by the habit of reading for the formation of the character and speech of young female readers.