I believe novels have a huge effect on society, whether it be subtle aspects of culture or monumental beliefs that are changed. Uncle Tom's Cabin shows how a story about a slave opened the public's eyes to the horrors and injustices against African Americans and slavery at the time.
Jane Austen is definately promoting novel reading because both the hero and heroine enjoy reading novels while Thorpe does not. Even though Catherine is not used to high-society, she behaves much better than many of her counterparts who have grown up in that lifestyle.
I think novels have a lot of power because some things that could not be said verbally at the time, could be written into a carefully crafted work, still discussing the same themes, but it gave people an outlet to express their feelings freely and sometimes anonymously. With those issues out in the open like that in literary works, it couldn't help but affect society in some way.
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