Pride-and-Prejudice

Peninsular War, when Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal in an effort to
close ports to British commerce, Austen declared, “How horrible it is to have
so many people killed!—And what a blessing that one cares for none of
them!” (Le Faye, Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 191; see “For Further Reading”).
If history and politics in general, and the war with France in particular,
seem far removed from the affairs of Austen’s novels, it is worth
remembering that the militia and army provide romantic distraction in the
form of dashing young officers for the two youngest Bennet sisters, Kitty and
Lydia, in Pride and Prejudice, while her final novel, Persuasion, centers on
the romantic interests of British naval officers. A feature of Austen’s comic
mode is that the events that produce the greatest instability within the British
nation are tamed into the material of harmless social disarray that furthers the
romantic plot. We find the same process at work in other of her novels.
Several scholars have noted that the Bertram family estate of Mansfield Park
must be supported by the West Indian slave economy and that Sir Thomas
Bertram’s absence from his home in England in order to protect his interests
in Antigua provides the occasion for the Bertram children and their friends to
engage in the mildly improper behavior that promotes comic disorder. We are
also reminded of local instability when Harriet Smith, of Emma, is accosted
by a band of gypsies and must be rescued by Frank Churchill; the incident
plays on commonly held fears of the vagrants and highway-men who traveled
the roads of England.
Austen’s firsthand experiences of the world and its momentous events seem
limited if we consider her life in terms of the travels that might have spurred
her writer’s imagination. Unlike many of her contemporaries whose literary
work was enriched by journeys to Scotland, Ireland, and the European
continent, Austen spent most of her relatively short life—she died in 1817 at
age forty-one, possibly of Addison’s disease or of a form of lymphoma—in
the small villages and towns and countryside of the county of Hampshire, in
the south of England. Despite several visits to London, vacation tours
throughout southern England, and several years’ residence in the spa city of
Bath and in the port town of Southampton, Austen can hardly be called
cosmopolitan, and, in any case, she would have preferred to think of herself
as provincial, a description that better suits her sense of her subject matter as a
writer. In a letter to her niece Anna Austen, an aspiring novelist, she
dispensed the now famous advice that “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is
the very thing to work on” (Letters, p. 275).
Austen’s life appears to have been relatively untroubled, although there
must have been painful episodes. The daughter of a respectable Anglican