This book is an exploration of Jane Austen's novels through the eyes of an historian. It demonstrates how the novels illuminate English history between 1792 and 1817, and how an appreciation of history can enrich our reading of the novels themselves. Building a picture of Jane Austen's life and of the world she inhabited in the period during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, Oliver MacDonagh analyzes her experience and her reactions, showing how she worked them into her fiction.