The Orphan of the Rhine The Orphan of the Rhine The Orphan of the Rhine was a gothic novel by Eleanor Sleath, listed as one of the seven "horrid novels" by Jane Austen in her novel "Northanger Abbey". Subtitled "A Romance" it was published in four volumes the sensationalist Minerva Press in 1798. It was part of a brief but popular vogue of German tales, a fashion criticized in the "Critical Review" of June 1807 "So great is the rage for German tales, and German novels, that a cargo is no sooner imported than the booksellers' shops are filled with a multitude of translators, who
Reception history of Jane Austen around him". Modern Austen scholar William Galperin has noted that "unlike some of Austen's lay readers, who recognized her divergence from realistic practice as it had been prescribed and defined at the time, Walter Scott may well have been the first to install Austen as the realist par excellence". Scott wrote in his private journal in 1826, in what later became a widely quoted comparison: "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion", published together posthumously in December 1817, were reviewed in the "British Critic" in March 1818 and in the "Edinburgh Review and Literary Miscellany" in May 1818. The reviewer for the "British