DR LIZZIE ROGERS ON HOW AUSTEN’S WRITING REFLECTS A PIVOTAL PERIOD OF HISTORY
It is easy to dismiss Jane Austen’s era as a quiet period in England’s history, when the months passed in a succession of visits to country houses, grand balls and taking tea. Yet the years through which the author lived, from 1775 to 1817, represented a period of great transition.
We do both ourselves and Austen a great injustice if we reduce those 41-plus years to the kind of neat, confined picture of serenity often falsely associated with her work. The idea that her writing was merely amusing and warming was so enduring that her novels were even prescribed for soldiers suffering from shell-shock after World War I, such were their comforting properties. Yet during her lifetime, England – and the wider world – was experiencing great upheavals, the legacies of which we are still grappling with today.
Austen’s writing provides glimpses of a changing world. In the years following her birth, Britain was at war with France and Spain, and militias across the country were ready to fight at any time. Though the British trade in enslaved people was prohibited in 1807, the institution of slavery would not be abolished until almost three decades later, and total emancipation still lay many more years in the future.
The position of women in society was under scrutiny, too. Mary Wollstonecraft, an important voice among the canon of writers addressing gender inequality, published her hugely influential book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. And let us not forget campaigns for better representation in Parliament, revolutions on either side of the Atlantic, and instability in the rule of the country as the future – and rather unpopular – George
