Following her essay about the influence of Adam Smith’s economic theories in Jane Austen’s novels, writing at The Atlantic, Shannon Chamberlain gets back to the topic, this time debating what influence fiction had, and in particular the emerging genre of the novel, in Smith’s production:

“Perhaps this sense of turmoil, of progress that could still be undone, explains Smith’s apparent ambiguity about novels. What Smith likes about history is that we can read knowing that the events turned out the way that they did and attend instead to their literary beauties. But the outcome to the struggles he so cared about had yet to be written. Real life offered plenty of suspense for Smith; why pile on with novels?”