Literary critic George Saintsbury argued that Jane Austen's naturalistic female characters owed a debt to this society novel's spirited heroine. Certainly when Austen was updating her early novel-draft 'Susan', which eventually appeared in print as Northanger Abbey, she added a reference to Belinda:[6]
" 'Oh, it is only a novel.....It is only Cecilia or Camilla, or Belinda '; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed".
Belinda was itself in the tradition of British society novels[7] by writers such as Frances Sheridan and Frances Burney, who also charted the travails of bright young women in search of a good marriage. Perhaps Edgeworth's best courtship novel, Belinda replaces mercenary fortune-hunting with a deeper quest for marital compatibility, valorising irrationality and love over reason and duty in a way that prefigures Austen's treatments of the same theme.[8]
Aristocratic Lady Delacour in Belinda has been compared to Miss Milner in English novelist Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791).[9]
