Camilla (Burney novel) treats Clermont with well-deserved contempt, saying, "That person...is a fellow I have prodigious longing to give a good caning to." He takes a great liking to Camilla at first, but when he observes her seemingly coquettish behavior (in reality she was just making a naive mistake in the process of trying to repulse Hal's affection), his partiality for her soon cools. Later he grows delighted with Lavinia, who is "pretty near as pretty" as her sister, and whose gentle sweetness wins his blunt heart over. Jane Austen referred to "Camilla" and other novels in her novel, "Northanger Abbey": “'And what
Persuasion (novel) the power of books over women; namely were women more susceptible to the power of reading than men, and if so, was reading a benign or malign influence on women? Austen had first taken up this question in "Northanger Abbey" where reading Gothic books has comic effects on Catherine Morland, but also gives a more acute sense of reality and to understand people. Pinch wrote that Austen returned to this theme of the power of books on women in "Persuasion", but in a more mature and probing manner, where as the novel is concerned with "... what it feels like