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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I really liked Jane Austen’s bookshelf.  I do not remember the author writing that she had never heard of them as they are mentioned in Jane Austen’s book.  Her thesis was that even though those authors are right there in Austen’s books, they have been systematically removed from popular reading and replaced by Austen’s works as though she sprang from whole cloth with no antecedents.  So, it had not occurred to the author to have read them.[/quote]

Yes, NP here, I have to say that I think this is a fair point, even if OP thought it was made in an annoying way. I was a lit major, though focused on German lit, so did not have much academic introduction to the writers OP lists. But I have read perhaps about 1/2 of Austen's works on my own and agree that, at least in the popular imagination, she is presented as a sort of sui generis talent, not as part of a broader literary movement. I mean there are the "Romantic poets" but it's not like we recognize an early 19th-century "domestic satirists" movement or something!

(Also I have only ever heard of Radcliff.)[/quote]

Hmm.  I'm one of the PP's.  I think it was pretty commonly discussed in my lit classes that England had a culture of producing long novels that were "bestsellers" among the class of people who read novels.  I think modern Regency romances refer to that kind of reading behavior a lot.  I think it's more true that female authors from the time period did not get namechecked.

I specifically remember a lot of mentions of "Tom Jones" and "Pamela", which were mid-1700s books written by men.  I have never read these, but they are top of mind for titles that kept coming up.[/quote]

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