

Jane Austen would have been very proud of young adult fiction readers this week. Using the #RealisticYA and #VeryRealisticYA hashtags, many have been lining up to puncture the genre’s often fantastical plots with fragments of narrative in a rather more ordinary key. For instance, @corpsehands wrote “a teen finds out there are werewolves at the school. they’d investigate, but they have a LOT of homework to do.”

Such miniature parodies of dystopian sagas and supernatural romances, filling Twitter with ordinary girls and boys forswearing epic quests and magical initiations to get on with revision or household chores, continue a tradition that dates back to Northanger Abbey – and beyond.

Seventeen-year-old student John Hansen’s #RealisticYA tweets follow in the footsteps of Austen’s 1817 novel, in which she replaced the extravagant incidents and foreign settings of the sensational Gothic fictions loved by her heroine Catherine with the everyday concerns of middle-class “young adults” in late 18th-century England.

Austen was already practiced as an author of “realistic” literary satire when she began drafting the work that became Northanger Abbey in her early twenties. As a teenager during the mid- and late 1780s, she shared with her own social network of family members and close friends a series of high-spirited spoofs on the “romances” (fictions with historical or fantasy elements) and sentimental novels that dominated the literary market while she was growing up.

The teenage Austen’s stories parody the melodramatic narratives of 18th-century sentimental novels with a calculated banality that is echoed in the best of the #RealisticYA tweets. She opens Jack and Alice with the statement that “Mr Johnson was once upon a time about 53; in a twelve-month afterwards he was 54”. In Love and Freindship [sic], meanwhile, Austen’s reader is informed that “Isabel had seen the world. She had passed 2 years at one of the first [i.e. best] boarding schools in London; had spent a fortnight in Bath and had supped one night in Southampton.”

Earlier authors who mocked the sentimental novels, and especially their ambiguous – and thus suspicious – combination of sexual explicitness with equally overt moralising, included Henry Fielding. He found it so implausible that the long-suffering, maidservant heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) could have been motivated by disinterested virtue alone in reforming her employer and would-be seducer (who subsequently marries her), that he rewrote the novel a year later as Shamela, reimagining its heroine as a disingenuous gold-digger.



Another “realistic” novelist of this period was Charlotte Lennox, who in 1752 published The Female Quixote as an updated, female-centred version of Cervantes’ classic. Lennox’s work – a significant influence on Northanger Abbey – focuses on Arabella, a girl who bases her expectations of life and relationships on the semi-fantastical French romances of the 17th century.

In The Female Quixote, the clashes between Arabella’s romantic outlook on life and the everyday realities around her provide a rich vein of comedy - as when she imagines that an unusually well-mannered gardener employed at her home must be a nobleman in disguise, seeking to court her. However, Lennox’s satire also had a serious moral message. Along with other commentators of the period, she worried that much of the fiction being read by young people did not represent the real challenges of life for which they needed to be prepared – even though it could be of limited benefit in encouraging high ideals of honour, and sympathetic feeling for others.

The puncturing of unrealistic expectations remained crucial to young heroes’ and heroines’ educations in fiction throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. In Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), the eponymous schoolgirl heroine realises her ambition of fainting like the delicate ladies in the novels she has read – but only by spraining her ankle in a fall from a roof.

Austen’s Catherine, Lennox’s Arabella, and Montgomery’s Anne are all convinced of the error of their ways partly by experience, but also by the persuasion of a kindly, older character. In Catherine’s case, this is the witty young clergyman whom she marries; for Arabella it is an understanding doctor, and for Anne it is the teacher who encourages her to stop fantasising about the chivalric past and pursue a professional career.

As the #RealisticYA tweets show, however, for real-life young adult readers such interventions would seem to be unnecessary. Over the past week, they have instead demonstrated that it is they who can educate the authors catering to their supposed needs as readers. Like the teenaged Austen, they are evidently fully capable not only of enthusiastically consuming, but also of astutely and independently critiquing, the fictions so carefully directed at them by the market.