'A higher sphere of society':How Jane Austen’s Legacy Fashions the Silver Fork Novel’s Materiality

This paper will discuss the Silver Fork novel's response to Jane Austen's literary legacy, which is expressed and practiced by this genre's exploring of narrative boundaries of the novel through its intensely material narratives. The Silver Fork novel, a genre that flourished in Britain during the 1820s and 30s and has since died out, is famous for its plotlessness and lack of inner life of characters, as well as for its unrestrained and supposedly superficial depiction of the material life of the aristocratic society. This essay would like to argue that this remarkable feature of the Silver Fork novel stems in part from an 'inflation' in Austen’s work, that is, the discrepancy between the class in which Austen’s contemporary and later readers placed her characters, and the class that the financial amounts described in her novels themselves actually suggest. In other words, the money in Austen does not have the effect and impression it should do. Austen's relative silence on material life led Silver Fork novelists to misinterpret the society she depicted and to openly proclaim their own cause of transferring her 'familiar narrative' to a 'higher sphere of society', demonstrating both the genre's inheritance from Austen and how they would explore the boundaries of the English realistic fiction tradition with their material depictions. This paper understands the strangeness of the Silver Fork novel, a genre long dismissed and almost erased from the English literary history, by exploring its creative response to Austen.