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 18th- and early 19th-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 the multifaceted narratives she created.

About the Author

Jeremy Black is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Exeter and a Senior Fellow both of Policy Exchange and of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of many books, including A Subject for Taste: Culture in Eighteenth-Century England; George III: America's Last King; England in the Age of Shakespeare; and Charting the Past: The Historical Worlds of Eighteenth-Century England. Black is a recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History.

Reviews

Jeremy Black's new book on England in the Age of Austen, just published by Indiana University Press (2021), will be a treat for anyone who loves Jane - and who does not? - as well as anyone who is interested in her contexts. Black situates Austen's work in its social, political, economic and religious cultures, showing how her youthful commitments to Jacobite politics evolved into a more mature appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. Alert to the ironies of her own life and the lives of her characters, Austen wrote of the kind of world in which she wanted to live, balancing the disappointments of her own life and those of her characters with a dependency upon providence and an active commitment to preserve the best values of English society.

-- Crawford Gribben * New Books Network *

An absolute 'must' for the legions of Jan Austen fans, England in the Age of Austen is an extraordinarily well written history, impressively detailed, and a seminal work of original scholarship.

* Midwest Book Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253051936
Author Jeremy Black
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press