This chapter examines the relationship between excess and the ways that Romantic novels were envisioned as in – or out of – fashion. As industrial production ramped up in the early nineteenth century, supplying consumers with mass-produced luxuries of all types, so too was the popular novel conceptualized as a consumer good, an object to buy and display as much as a text to read. The chapter begins with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, analysing the novel’s focus on fashion, advertising, work, and value. Moving forward to the 1810s, it then discusses several novels by Minerva author ‘Miss Byron’, among others, to demonstrate how authors used the idea of fashion to defend the novel and make visible the often-ignored labour of its authors. The excesses of overspending consumers become a metaphor for the glut of the literary market, while the notion of luxury as always created by someone’s work – but also as essentially commodified and interchangeable – implicates the novel in a commercial system that challenges the hierarchies of strictly literary valuations.

Chapter 4 reveals the extent of Maria Edgeworth's participation in a form of networked authorship borne out in interactions with her family, previous texts, reviewers, and readers, which can be discerned within her revisions to four of her major novels: Belinda (1801), Patronage (1814), Harrington (1817), and Helen (1834).Her post-publication revisions to Belinda and Patronage are linked, especially in the case of the latter, to her interest in scientific and scholarly knowledge and her struggle to moderate her didactic moralism.This book discusses, for the first time, an early fragmentary version of Harrington, which contained an anti-semitic first-person narrator, which was removed before publication.Edgeworth’s published version was a departure from her usual didacticism, which she attenuated once more in the 1825 edition.Her final novel Helen and her unfinished fiction Take for Granted attest to, perhaps more than any other novels in this project, their collaborative origins: they were influenced by her family and her readers at all stages of the composition process.