PGScholars have often used Austen as a gateway to study earlier writers, but my initial explorations into these books were discouraging. It felt as if every time I turned a corner, I ran into a dead end. First, I turned to one of the pioneering academic monographs on the subject, Frank W. Bradbrook’s Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (1966), which included an entire chapter about “The Feminist Tradition” in the English novel that influenced Austen. I thought that title boded well. I was wrong. It immediately introduced the tradition as “not particularly distinguished.”
He categorically dismissed the novelists whom Austen had praised in her own works, such as Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, and Maria Edgeworth: “Jane Austen turns inferior work by her predecessors and contemporaries to positive and constructive uses.” According to an authority like Bradbrook, this quest of mine had already been investigated and resolved: we call Jane Austen the first great woman writer in English…because she was.
But Austen herself had provided evidence contradicting that conclusion. Were these authorities suggesting that some of the favorite books of one of the greatest authors of all time were trash? Would an author of that caliber really have had such terrible taste?
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