Novel Criticism

Female eighteenth-century critics were active in several arenas, and their work was influential in different cultural milieus. They influenced literary taste—especially with the literary salons as a point of departure; they made contributions to genre theory—as in Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785); and they reflected on technical aspects of literature—as in Anna Lætitia (also Letitia) Barbauld (née Aikin)’s introduction to The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Vol. I (1804), where the author reflects on fiction and narrative form (xxiii–xxviii). Women especially left their mark on the novel, a relatively new genre, established as increasingly mainstream and respectable from about the mid-eighteenth century onward into the early nineteenth century. Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (née Necker), in De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800), argues that there is a direct connection between the evolution of literary genres and the status of women, and she claims that the relatively high status of women in England was a precondition for the development of the novel (Castle, Women and literary criticism. In: Nisbet HB, Claude R (eds) The Cambridge history of literary criticism. Vol. IV The eighteenth century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 434–455, 1997). Both she and Madame de Genlis (née Caroline-Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin) regarded female participation in culture, and in literary institutions, as necessary for social and moral enlightenment.