Roget's Int'l Thesaurus Fowler's King's English The King James
Bible Brewer's Phrase & Fable Frazer's Golden Bough Shelf of
Fiction The Romantic Revival > Early tales Pride and Prejudice
INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS The Cambridge History of English and
American Literature in 18 Volumes Volume XII. The Romantic
Revival. § 1. Early tales. THE literary descent of Jane Austens
fiction is plain to trace. Its ancestors were the work of Defoe,
the Roger de Coverly papers in the fiction of Fielding and of
Richardson, the poems of Cowper and the poetical tales of
Crabbe. It belongs to the movement towards naturalism and the
study of common life and character, without intrusion of the
romantic and the heroic, which prevailed in England in the
closing years of the eighteenth century. An impetus, together
with a narrowing of its scope, was given to it by Fanny Burney.
Of Fanny Burney, it was written in a previous volume of this
that she created the novel of home life. Jane Austen read her
novels (in her twenty-first year (1796)