There are two questions from the first half to deal with first though. The first is the extended discussion of history between Catherine, Miss Tilney and Henry Tilney in Chpater 14 of bk one.
It begins with a discussion of Radcliffe and Catherine's remark that Henry probably doesn't read novels. He asks her why she would think this and she replies:
"Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books."This is not just some fancy of Catherine's. Women read far more novels than men did, as is still the case. And just as the novel market today was criticized for being a lot of crap, so to the market of Austen's day. Sexists of the time argued that the trash was a consequence of the supposedly undiscriminating taste of women.
Nowadays, Sir Walter Scott is not read nearly as much as he was then but he was credited with making the novel respectable in much the same way that Christy Mathewson is often credited with making baseball respectable.
Scott wrote novels that men wanted to read. He knew that Austen was the better novelist but no one else did. His was the name to conjure with. And what Scott did was to introduce history to the novel. The moral pressure to put big important details, such as history, in novels was very real and Austen was determined to resist it. What does she make of history here?
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