An erudite exploration of the female writers who influenced the celebrated 19th-century author brings to light neglected or forgotten but often captivating literature

It would be easy to mistake Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf for one of the many books produced annually by the Jane Austen industrial-entertainment complex: Jane Austen at Home, Jane Austen: Her Homes & Her Friends, Jane Was Here: An illustrated Guide to Jane Austen’s England. So much cultural real estate has been built off those six published books of Austen’s, it’s a wonder someone hasn’t thought before to do a little detective work into the authors that influenced her: Ann Radcliffe, whose 1794 gothic thriller The Mysteries of Udolpho peppers every other conversation in Northanger Abbey; Elizabeth Inchbald, whose 1798 play Lovers’ Vows is rehearsed by the characters in Mansfield Park; and Frances Burney, whose third novel, Camilla (1796), originated the phrase “pride and prejudice”. “There are two Traits in her Character which are pleasing,” Austen once wrote of a friend, “namely she admires Camilla, & drinks no cream in her Tea.”

To her chagrin, Romney had not even heard of Burney, despite being a self-confessed Austen fanatic and a rare book dealer to boot, but she soon found she was not alone. Burney is not even mentioned on Austen’s Wikipedia page and merits only dismissive mentions in most histories of the period, such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957), which concluded, condescendingly, “it was Jane Austen who completed the work that Fanny Burney had begun”. And this despite the Georgian era being the first time in English history more women published novels than men. It wasn’t that Burney wasn’t any good, it was that she wasn’t as good as Austen, even though Richardson or Fielding are never asked to pass the same test. “When Burney loses, that’s it: she’s off those canonical reading lists,” writes Romney, crisply. “Between women writers, you have to beat the best or you don’t get to play at all.”