Eighteenth-Century Fiction

With thanks to Mariah Chao, Min Ling Chua, Ector Diego, Alison Durfee, Eva Kareus, Bruce Kaufman, Noah Mahoney, and Darya Navid

With remote learning on the rise, the coronavirus pandemic may accelerate a longstanding trend of reallocating library funds to digital subscriptions. Such developments bode well for the success of Broadview Press’s recently launched, author-focused “companion websites,” including Jane Austen in Context. The Austen site caters to “students ... who would like help with term paper research.” Given the target audience, this review includes feedback from undergraduates enrolled in an honours seminar on British literary history. A number of students were enthusiastic about the site’s prospects. Indeed, the site has the makings of a valuable course supplement. Yet its current iteration seems to be more of a prototype; substantial development is necessary to unlock its potential.

The site’s home page links to four primary areas: a selection of scholarship on Austen’s fiction (primarily her six completed novels); interactive maps of settings featured in the novels; click-to-expand time-lines of relevant biographical and historical developments; and a searchable collection of contextual materials, including images, pertaining to Regency culture and politics, with topics ranging from “Domestic Life” to “Wills and Primogeniture.” Undergirding the presentation is an anti-New Critical premise: the site implicitly contends that readers must familiarize themselves with Austen’s world in order to understand her work.

In written comments, students lauded the site’s convenience and curation. Several recalled struggling on their own to distinguish worthy research from dubious sources when confronting the massive array of search results in online databases such as Google Scholar and JSTOR. They perceived Broadview’s effort as a potential solution to that problem, for it includes a manageable selection of critical essays (five or six per novel) vetted for quality. At a time when reference librarians may be less accessible because they are working remotely, online resources need to fill the void.

Unlike some Austen websites for advanced aficionados, the site is streamlined. A student remarked: “I was pleasantly surprised [by] how neatly the website was laid out ... I already know a lot more about Jane Austen despite the fact that I am not familiar with this author.” The interactive maps and timelines were the favourite elements. A self-described “Austen fanatic” commented: “The maps were fun to play around with ... it was very entertaining to have a visual representation of where Austen’s characters move to throughout the course of her stories.” [End Page 270]

Yet there is considerable room for improvement. No list of the site’s editors or compilers was included. A student pointed out: “There should be a page that states where ... the information on the site is coming from. This would make the site more credible.” Another student noted that while the essays are grouped according to the novels on which they focus, there is no further structure to their categorization. Each essay is prefaced with a blurb summarizing its argument, but there is no explanation of why it was chosen or the essay’s place in Austen scholarship. Users must click into each PDF and scroll to the end to see publication dates. The site does not render visible the extent to which views of Austen have developed over time. Even brief excerpts from Deidre Shauna Lynch’s edited collection Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000) and Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen (2017) would help fill this gap.

While the content illuminates the time and place in which Austen wrote, the site obscures the author and, at points, her readers. There are no images or biography of Austen, nor is there a bibliography of her work; students requested a biography page to complement the timeline. Although such information could be accessed via search engines, these are surprising omissions. “I would like more primary sources that reflect the reception of Austen’s literature at the time that it was published,” one student commented. That student added: “The critical...