Pride-and-Prejudice

reasonable that Elizabeth follows her heart and ends up fabulously wealthy
attests to Austen’s powers of crafting a story in which early hostilities and
inappropriate desires are deftly reconciled, and far more realistically so than
in comedies by Shakespeare, where happy resolutions must be effected either
by wildly improbable coincidences or supernatural forces.
It is sometimes said that Austen’s gift was to be a shrewd observer of her
narrow, genteel social circle, that her experience and knowledge of the world
were limited and her life sheltered, and that her novels realistically reflect the
peaceful late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth century village community and
English countryside she inhabited. That Austen was a careful observer of
human motivation and social interaction is certainly true. One should not
assume, though, that her choice to write novels of manners means that she
was unaware of or unaffected by the political and social upheaval of her day.
The idea that she centers her novels on the social classes with which she was
most familiar is not entirely the case, although she had occasion to observe
members of the gentry and aristocracy whose circumstances resembled those
of some of the characters who populate her novels. Whether her own life was
perfectly serene is questionable: Most lives, no matter how uneventful in
retrospect, have their vicissitudes.
At the very least, Austen and her family must have had concerns over the
tumultuous historical events that unsettled the British nation during their
lifetime. She was born in 1775, the year that marked the beginning of the
American Revolution. Several decades later, she would read newspaper
accounts of another British conflict with the new American nation in the War
of 1812, which began as she finished revising Pride and Prejudice. What
must have played significantly in Austen’s imagination, as in the mind of
every Briton, was the ongoing war with Napoleon’s forces, which marked the
culmination of a century of conflicts between Britain and France, and which
ended, with the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, six months before her
fortieth birthday. The British fear of invasion by Napoleon, which endured
until 1805, caused concern even in the towns and villages that seemed safest.
Austen would have been aware of the billeting of British militia troops in the
English countryside, and she certainly followed the career of her brother
Henry, who had joined the Oxford militia in 1793, when Britain’s latest war
with France erupted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. She must also
have taken a personal interest in the campaigns of the British navy, which
counted her brothers Francis and Charles among its officers. To what extent
she cared about daily political events is difficult to discern, for her letters are
marked by characteristic irony. Of a newspaper report of an 1811 battle of the