Jane Austen and Edith Wharton's books (among others) are classified as novel of manners.
Why do you suppose that this genre was so frequently read?
My opinion: I suspect that some young women read them for moral and social instruction. Such books might have given them insight into how polite society conducted itself and what was considered right & proper.
Last edited by astrum; 02-15-2014 at 10:14 AM.
I don't think this genre was more frequently read than any others, I wouldn't speculate that young women read them for moral instruction, though some novels were recommended on this basis. Austen's novels reflect the cultural and aesthetic concerns of her society at the time, the books don't so much instruct (though the instructive value of art is a major theme in Northanger Abbey, but mostly as a target of criticism) as they reflect a general interest in the role of manners and action in relationship to social status and virtue. Burney and Austen are writing in a time of aristocratic decline, and they are writing from an upper middle class background to a largely middle class audience. Heroic virtue or aristocratic privilege are not accessible to people like Austen or Burney, or to the heroines of their novels. This is why manners are of such obsessive interest, because manners are how the middle class differentiates between good and bad people. I would conclude that the readers of Austen's novels (which included several men as well) read them because they appealed to their sensibilities and to the aesthetics of the time.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
Women probably read them because it was portraying their world and the people they knew.
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Last edited by astrum; 02-16-2014 at 10:44 PM.
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