England in the Age of Austen

“This brisk, decorous, and incisive history . . . would have delighted its namesake as much as it will delight and instruct contemporary readers.” —Roger Kimball, Editor and publisher, The New Criterion

Dedicated fans of Jane Austen’s novels will delight in accompanying historian Jeremy Black through the drawing rooms, chapels, and battlefields of the time in which Austen lived and wrote. In this exceedingly readable and sweeping scan of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, Black provides a historical context for a deeper appreciation of classic novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. While Austen’s novels bring to life complex characters living in intimate surroundings, England in the Age of Austen provides a fuller account of what the village, the church, and the family home would really have been like. In addition to seeing how Austen’s own reading helped her craft complex characters like Emma, Black also explores how recurring figures in the novels, such as George III or Fanny Burney, provide a focus for a historical discussion of the fiction in which they appear. Jane Austen’s world was the source of her works and the basis of her readership, and understanding that world gives fans new insights into her enduring literature.

“Superb. . . . Essential reading for the Austen enthusiast.” —William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University

“England in the Age of Austen recovers a world before the Victorians that brings one of our greatest authors into clearer focus.” —William Anthony Hay, Mississippi State University

“An absolute ‘must’ for the legions of Jan Austen fans . . . an extraordinarily well written history, impressively detailed, and a seminal work of original scholarship.” —Midwest Book Review