Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Novel of Manners - Domestic Order

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DOMESTIC ORDER

William Forsyth

SOURCE: "Goldsmith: Jane Austen," in The Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, An Illustration of the Manners and Morals of the Age, D. Appleton & Company, 1871, pp. 322-30.

[In the following excerpt, Forsyth praises Jane Austen's portrayals of English domestic life, though he protests, nonetheless, the excessive attention her characters devote to matters of matrimony.]

Strictly speaking, [the] charming writer [Jane Austen] belongs to the present century, for her first publication took place in 1811. But three of her novels were written several years before, and two of them had been offered in vain to the booksellers. Fully to appreciate the excellence of Miss Austen's works, one ought to have some acquaintance with the state of the literature of fiction at the time she began to write. Besides the gloomy horrors of the Radcliffe school, there was a flood of weak and vapid novels...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Social And Political Order
4. Domestic Order
5. Depictions Of Gender
6. The American Novel Of Manners
7. Further Reading
8. Copyright