I think there were ideas about The Novel around at the time when she was writing about how it should formally be, strongly inflected by H James and presumably the sort of thing that EM Forster was about when he disses on breaking the 4th wall in Aspects of the Novel. (And for real tooth-grindyness about C19th women novelists, see David Cecil's work on same.)

Which also has problems about being a Whiggish progress narrative to The Perfect Model of What A Novel Should Be Like, as in 'Fielding did all these asides to reader, but we NO BETTAH NAO'.

Failure to embrace the sixty and sixty (+) ways.