SOURCE: "The Novel of Manners and Jane Austen," in A Survey of English Literature: 1780-1830, Vol. I, Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1912, 172-201.

In the following excerpt, Elton discusses the context for Opie's writings, the influence of her own morality on her writing, and her ability to present pathos, dialogue, the embroiled situation, and personal portraits.

The 'poetic genius, which is the Lord,' was also astir, during the last decade of the century, in Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; but its record must now be forsaken awhile, in order to notice other workings of the English mind and imagination, in prose. And first of fiction,¹ which for thirty years remains in a transitional state, and whose rebirth is much later than that of poetry. The great age of the novel ends after A Sentimental Journey (1768) and Humphry Clinker (1771), to be renewed in Sense and Sensibility (published 1811), and in Waverley...