Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds

This book is an exploration of Jane Austen's novels through the eyes of an historian. It demonstrates how the novels illuminate English history between 1792 and 1817, and how an appreciation of history can enrich our reading of the novels themselves. Building a picture of Jane Austen's life and of the world she inhabited in the period during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, Oliver MacDonagh analyzes her experience and her reactions, showing how she worked them into her fiction. Each chapter combines an examination of Jane Austen's ideas and conduct in a particular field with a consideration of her treatment of the same subject in one or more of her works. Topics such as her Anglicanism, her family relations, and her opinions on money are investigated in this way. Similarly, other chapters takle themes such as girlhood, education, marriage and local society. In every case her real and imagined worlds richly illuminate each other.