Yes, novels

Back to Northanger Abbey and to chapter five where Miss Austen writes:

... they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

For a long time television worked the same way. Characters on television shows in my youth never watched television themselves and there was never any evidence that they even owned one. Nowadays, of course, we regard novels as a higher form of art than television (although there is a growing dissent on this) but they were often-criticized for being base and corrupting at the time Austen was writing.

And God bless Jane Austen, she read a lot of trash. I like her for that; and not just because I started on Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys myself.

Janet Todd called Austen's reading habits promiscuous* and that is a good way to put it.



* She actually described Austen as "reading promiscuously".