Note 40 — NORTHANGER ABBEY.[18]
Reading edition
If Jane Austen be right—and she was a great judge of human nature—in the implication that an eager, enthusiastic young reader is impelled to reproduce in personal experience what he or she reads, and if modern sensational novels come to be lived by our young men and women, where shall we look—how shall we answer for the wrong done by our idiotic, noxious, light literature?