Jane Austen in defence of the novel

The person who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

While my recently read list is packed with textbooks, histories and treatises, there's nothing I enjoy more than a good novel. So with no imminent deadlines, I decided to give myself a Christmas treat, and finally read Northanger Abbey. Having lived in Bath for four years, this novel has always appealed to me (I love to think of the characters walking down streets so familiar to me). Yet, as always when I read Austen, I've found my choice of reading material criticised. Her works are intelligent, witty and slyly critical of the social norms of the Georgian period, but more often than not they're written off as silly, fluffy, girly nonsense because they're romantic novels. With that in mind, I found the following excerpt from Northanger Abbey (Chapter Five) particularly apt:

Although our [novelists'] productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss — ?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

As Austen so eloquently argues, it takes a lot skill and creativity to create a - good - novel, so they shouldn't just be written of as a frivolity. Moreover, I believe we can learn as much, if not more, about people and society - psychologically, historically, politically - from fiction. Fiction gives authors the freedom to say what can't be presented as historical truth, the creative process lets the unconscious speak, and being captivated by characters can absorb the reader into a situation much more effectively than reading dry facts. That's why I want to research and analyse novels and why it hurts to have my choice of reading so derided.