Jane and the Genius of the Place

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BRITISH NOVELIST JANE AUSTEN WAS BORN ON THE EVE of her country's conflict with its American colonies, in 1775, and died only two years after Napoleon's second abdication in 1815; yet the turmoil of England's passage through more than four decades of revolution and warfare is barely evident in her novels. As a result, her fiction has too often been dismissed as superficial or as reflecting the purely “female” preoccupations of domestic life. An Austen scholar might be quick to point out the naval influences in Persuasion, or argue that the subtle shifts in social practices and mores that Austen repeatedly chronicles could exist only in the broader context of political transformation — but in the main, her fiction mentions military figures most often as they appear at a ball, and politics not at all.

Austen's letters, however, reveal her to have been anything but ignorant of the affairs of her day. As Warren Roberts points out in his engrossing work, Jane Austen and the French Revolution(Macmillan, 1979), the novelist habitually read the London newspapers and commented on the political news reported in them. She followed the battles and engagements of the Royal Navy with avid interest, having two brothers serving in ships of the line, and she spent the entire summer of 1805 near the coastline of Kent — Napoleon's ground zero for invasion.

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