Was Susanna Clarke using any particular author's style for "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell"?

Question

Susanna Clarke's excellent novel *Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell* is written in a very convincing (at least to me) "19th-century literature" style. Not only the language used by the characters but also the sentence structure and storytelling style of the non-dialogue sections of the book feel very much like those of classical authors such as Austen, Hardy, or the Brontes.Real connoisseurs of 19th-century literature will probably be shaking their heads at my lumping all of those authors together (so am I, to be honest). Hence my question: **was there any specific classical author whose writing style inspired Clarke's style in *Strange & Norrell*?**Quotes from the author herself would probably be the best way of answering this, but if anyone can put together an answer based simply on textual analysis, I'll be mightily impressed.

Answer 1

Yes, definitely. Jane Austen is probably the biggest influence you’re hearing, although Clarke wasn’t trying to copy just one author. She has talked about Austen as an influence, especially in the quieter social scenes, where the humor comes from conversations, manners, and the way people observe and judge one another. That dry, understated humor is very Austen-like.

There’s also quite a bit of Dickens in the book, especially in the exaggerated characters, strange personalities, and more elaborate descriptions. Jonathan Strange himself has some of the qualities of a Romantic or “Byronic” hero, which brings in another literary tradition.

So I think your instinct about Austen, the Brontës, and Hardy is actually pretty good. They obviously have very different styles, but Clarke is drawing on the broader tradition of nineteenth-century English fiction rather than reproducing one particular writer. That’s probably why the book feels so convincingly like an old nineteenth-century novel while still sounding completely like Clarke.