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Jane Austen’s literary influences

Jane Austen’s literary influences

by Rachel Deeley

22 October 2025

min read

Like all good writers, Jane Austen was an avid reader. She grew up in a relatively bookish family, where books (including her own) were read aloud in the drawing room from her family home in Alton, Hampshire. And from a young age, Austen demonstrated a precocious knack for understanding the forms, plots and tropes of the works she read, stripping them down and appropriating, mimicking, reconfiguring and parodying them as she began to find her own voice as a writer.

Austen read widely, but she was no literary snob. She read everything from high literature by her contemporaries and predecessors such as Henry Fielding, to pulp fiction and sentimental romances – and, like so many young ladies of her time, schoolroom textbooks instructing girls on proper conduct and morality, which Austen poked fun at rather mercilessly in her teenage writings (including a "Misconduct book" penned at age 15).

We can't know exactly all the books that Austen owned and read, but some remain on display in the Jane Austen House Museum, and passing references in letters and her own novels build an illuminating picture of the writers who influenced her.

Inspired by visits to the Jane Austen House Museum and research in the book Jane Austen's Bookshelf: Women Writers who Shaped a Legend by Rebecca Romney, here are just a few of the must-read classics to add to your shelf so that you, too, can read like one of the greats of literature.

5 books that influenced Jane Austen

Evelina by Frances Burney (1778)

It is clear from Austen's writing – both her personal letters and novels – that the works of English novelist and playwright Frances Burney loomed large in her imagination and writing process. References to Burney can be seen throughout Austen's work and are almost too many to count. As Romney notes in Jane Austen's Bookshelf, a character's appreciation for Burney's novels was a shorthand for good taste, and the narrator's defence of the novel form in Northanger Abbey name-checked not one but two Burney novels. Pride and Prejudice takes its name from a passage in Burney's 1782 novel Cecilia, and when Austen's father pitched the book to publishers (initially under the title Impressions, and rejected sight unseen), he compared it in length to Burney's first novel, Evelina.

The story follows a working-class girl who faces a number of moral trials and dilemmas as she navigates society, was hugely successful when it was published (anonymously) in 1778. Much like the Austen novels that would follow a generation later, Evelina had comedic edge, realistic dialogue, unflinching satire of the society it depicted, and a complex heroine and hero at the centre of its story.

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794)

One of the foremost names in gothic literature, Ann Radcliffe's writing attracted huge commercial success, but also satire and parody. The Mysteries of Udolpho, a first edition of which can be found in the Jane Austen House Museum, follows Emily St Aubert as she undergoes a truly astonishing series of ordeals, vicissitudes and supernatural events.

The Mysteries of Udolpho features heavily in Northanger Abbey, Austen's own foray into the gothic genre, where we find naïve, bookish heroine Catherine Morland engrossed in its pages and hero Henry Tilney similarly praising the hair-raising experience of reading it. At once an homage and pastiche, Northanger Abbey saw Austen take aim at the gothic novel with more nuance than most of the genre's detractors at the time.

The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox (1752)

Charlotte Lennox's witty novel reimagines Don Quixote, Cervantes' 1605 comical poem about a man indulging his chivalric flights of fancy, for the polite society of Georgian England. Its heroine, the young Arabella, is a voracious reader of French romances, and imagines being the heroine of her own adventures and misadventures from the confines of her sheltered rural life. As she begins to enter society in Bath and London, her rampant imagination tips into delusion and she finds herself in all manner of predicaments.

The parallels between The Female Quixote and Austen's Northanger Abbey are unmistakeable and, as Romney notes, we have evidence that Austen read – and enjoyed – Lennox's book more than once over the course of her life. Like Arabella, Northanger Abbey's Catherine is naïve and enthralled in the popular romances of her time, with a fantastical imagination that seeps into real life.

Pamela by Samuel Richardson (1740)

Considered by many to be the first English novel, Samuel Richardson's sentimental story about a 15-year-old girl who rebuffs the advances of her late mistress's son until her virtues are "rewarded" by marriage inspired heated debates, parodies (most famously Henry Fielding's Shamela), and above all, a new mode of writing.

Austen was known to be an avid reader of Richardson's works, her favourite among them the 1751 novel Sir Charles Grandison. The epistolary form of his writing, where the story was told through letters, marked an intimate new way of creating characters with deeper interiority. Austen experimented with this form in her earlier work (it is believed that Pride and Prejudice was initially an epistolary novel) and, even with her third-person narrator's voice, brought elements of intimacy and subjectivity through her free indirect style of writing.

Selected Essays by Samuel Johnson (1750s)

Austen's reading tastes extended far beyond fiction. According to a preface to Northanger Abbey written by her brother Henry, her "favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse." By these names he means William Cowper, acclaimed Romantic poet and abolitionist, and Samuel Johnson, poet, essayist, playwright and lexicographer, best known creating the hugely impactful A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755.

In this particular volume of essays, selected from Johnson's writings in periodicals such as The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler we see the evolving tone, style, and moral paradigm of one of the 18th Century's most influential literary figures.