A Companion to the Victorian Novel

Austen’s incomparably subtle technique was not lost, all the same, on a range of Victorian writers, including the exponents of provincial life. They learned much from her: the ironical control of narrative via free indirect discourse, the discrimination of character through speech and manners, the lucid assumption of a social habitus from the inside.

“Scott and Miss Austen” constitute a virtual, archetypal totality, larger than their individual achievements in domestic realism or historical romance—larger, perhaps, than the achievement of anyone who came later. Together they form the “complementary antithesis” that was needed to bring the novel to its dialectical completion. They won the empire that the Victorians merely colonized.