Jane Austen’s novels provide a fascinating picture of Georgian life – but how accurate are her portrayals? Historian and author Helen Amy considers rural life, social etiquette and more...
There are two good reasons to expect the novels of Jane Austen to be factually accurate. First, Austen wrote only about what she knew and what was probable, for fear of giving “false representations”. She drew directly from her own experience and observations of the people around her, and her works are full of the groups and types of people with whom she was familiar. Second, Austen was concerned about detail and accuracy. She did not, for example, describe men alone because she did not know how they talked without a woman present.
However, it’s important to remember that Austen was first and foremost a novelist, and creative considerations sometimes overrode factual accuracy. Her novels are works of art in which her considerable imaginative powers played a large part. Furthermore, due to her narrow focus on the lives of a few families in country villages, and because she wrote from a woman’s viewpoint, she provides an incomplete picture. Austen gives no real idea of the lives of men, and little insight into life beyond the affluent parts of mostly rural, southern England.
The wider backdrop to the novels is well depicted. England is accurately shown as a hierarchical and patriarchal society in which everyone knows their place and in which women are considered second-class citizens, largely confined to the private domestic sphere. Men run the country, public institutions and the professions, and they own the land. The authenticity of the world Austen presents is also enhanced by rounded and convincing characters.
COUNTRY LIVING
Existence in rural England is portrayed realistically in all of Austen’s novels – except Emma. In that book, the “large and populous village” of Highbury is self-sufficient and somewhat introspective, enjoying little contact with the outside world. All of the action takes place in and around Highbury, and only two of the characters ever travel beyond it. Although this picture was partly correct, it does not convey the fact that, at the time in which Emma was set, better-off people were beginning to travel outside their communities, taking advantage of improvements in transport. In the other novels, characters more realistically travel to Bath, London and other places.
