From JSTOR:
There are plenty of mentions of novels and popular literature in Jane Austen’s books. But books were expensive in the early nineteenth century, and women weren’t necessarily encouraged to read them. How, then, did her heroines get their book fix?
. . . .
[C]irculating libraries didn’t really resemble modern libraries. You had to pay to be a member, and if you patronized one you were likely of the leisured classes. And while modern libraries are predicated on a demand for books . . . circulating libraries created that demand.
The libraries, which were found in fashionable watering holes like Jane Austen’s fabled Bath, began as offshoots of bookselling. They became social gathering places that people subscribed to as soon as they got to their vacation destination. They weren’t just for books, either—they held raffles and social events, and the subscription record books were a good place to figure out who was in town. If you lived in a rural area, though, you were probably out of luck. No businessman would set one up in an area that couldn’t sustain it.
At the time, industrialization hadn’t yet made printing affordable, so only the richest could afford books. . . . [T]he average three-volume novel cost the equivalent of $100 at the time, which makes Darcy’s extensive library even sexier. And since anyone with enough money for a subscription could use a circulating library, it became a way for women to gain knowledge without asking a man for permission to use his library or borrow his books.
. . . .
Not everything in a circulating library was intellectually uplifting, though: They were repositories for the Regency version of beach reads. The hottest novel might be available for several months, then be replaced by the new big thing. This led to big demand for new books, and that demand drove bigger print runs. Authors also started writing with the libraries in mind, which led to the rise of genres like the gothic novel.
Link to the rest at JSTOR
“…only the richest could afford books…”
I suppose this depends on how you define “richest.” A few hundred years earlier, books were copied out by hand, and therefore far more expensive than in Austen’s day. The printing press revolutionized book prices. That someone like Eliza Bennet had any access at all (and was literate in the first place) shows this. But printing press technology had on progressed modestly, and paper was expensive. This would change over the course of the 19th century, with rotary presses and cheap pulp paper, bringing book prices down to where the masses could enjoy penny dreadfuls.
I find this fascinating, because it’s one of the things I found myself researching when I was writing my novel about Robert Burns’s wife, Jean Armour. Rab always ‘had his nose in a book’ but he was a not-terribly-well-off tenant farmer. I always have to point out in talks that books were an expensive commodity. He would give lists of books to his friends who might be travelling to Edinburgh and elsewhere, asking them to source books for him, seldom new. There was a market in used books, much as there is today. Also, he befriended the gentry and that must have given him some access to their libraries. But there is some evidence that the young ‘belles’ of Mauchline, of whom Jean was one, read these ‘forbidden’ novels – again, I suspect they were second and third hand. There was no library, but Mauchline was at a crossroads, some of these young women were the daughters of innkeepers and I imagine there were ways in which these novels could be begged, borrowed or occasionally stolen from passing travellers and then passed around among the young women.
Interesting! Thanks, PG. I hadn’t considered where women got their forbidden (or at least discouraged) novels.