Coleridge and William Wordsworth publish The Lyrical Ballads.

1801 Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, retires, and with the Napoleonic Wars looming in the background of British consciousness, he and his wife and two daughters leave the quiet country life of Steventon for the bustling, fashionable town of Bath. Many of the characters and depictions of society in Jane Austen’s subsequent novels are shaped by her experiences in Bath.

1803 Austen receives her first publication offer for her novel “Susan,” but the manuscript is subsequently returned by the publisher; it will later be revised and released as Northanger Abbey. The United States buys Louisiana from France. Ralph Waldo Emerson is born.

1804 Napoleon crowns himself emperor of France. Spain declares war on Britain.

1805 Jane’s father dies. Jane and her mother and sister subsequently move to Southampton. Sir Walter Scott publishes his Lay of the Last Minstrel.

1809 After several years of traveling and short-term stays in various towns, the Austen women settle in Chawton Cottage in Hampshire; in the parlor of this house Austen quietly composes her most famous works. Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are born.

1811 Austen begins Mansfield Park in February. In November Sense and Sensibility, the romantic misadventures of two sisters, is published with the notation “By a Lady”; all of Austen’s subsequent novels are also brought out anonymously. George III is declared insane, and the morally corrupt Prince of Wales (the future King George IV) becomes regent.

1812 Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm and the first parts of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold are published. The United States declares war on Great Britain.

1813 Pride and Prejudice is published; it describes the conflict between the high-spirited daughter of a country gentleman and a wealthy landowner. Napoleon is exiled to Elba, and the Bourbons are restored to power.

1814 Mansfield Park is published; it is the story of the difficult though ultimately rewarded life of a poor relation who lives in the house of her wealthy uncle.

1815 Austen’s comic novel Emma is published, centering on the heroine’s misguided attempts at matchmaking. Napoleon is defeated at Waterloo. Charlotte Brontë is born.

1817 Austen begins the satiric novel Sanditon, but abandons it because of declining health. She dies on July 18 in Winchester and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

1818 Northanger Abbey, a social satire with overtones of (parodied) terror, and Persuasion, about a reawakened love, are published under Austen’s brother Henry’s supervision.

Introduction

Long before Austenmania overtook America and England in the mid-1990s, when major films and television miniseries were produced of Jane Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, and three other of the six novels Austen completed as an adult, fans reported a private, proprietary sense of “Jane,” as though the great English novelist were a close acquaintance. Rudyard Kipling exploited this phenomenon in his short story “The Janeites,” which describes several members of a secret Jane Austen society, a group of soldiers in the trenches of World War I, well versed in Austen trivia and gallant defenders of “Jane” and the world she created. Both the jealously guarded private fantasy and the recent popular cultural phenomenon may be attributed in part to the enduring power of Austen’s genius as a writer: her ability to create singular characters who linger in one’s imagination, her unparalleled sense of irony and wit, her brilliant dialogue, and her carefully woven plots. At the same time, Austen delivers a satisfying romance, more so in Pride and Prejudice than in her other novels, and the sheer happiness of her main characters at the novel’s end has its own appeal.

Above all though, and in Pride and Prejudice especially, Austen appeals to modern readers’ nostalgia for a world of social, moral, and economic stability, but one where characters are free to make their own choices and pursue their hearts’ desires. The formal civility, the carefully prescribed manners, and sexual and social restraint, set against a backdrop of village community, stately manor houses, and an English landscape devoid of industrial turmoil and the brisk pace of modern technology—these are a welcome escape for today’s reader. So, too, the heroine Elizabeth Bennet’s bold independence and insistence on placing individual preference above economic motive in marriage satisfies our desire for a plot shaped through the pursuit of personal fulfillment. A convention of morality tales of Austen’s time is that individuals’ personal freedoms and aspirations cannot be easily reconciled with their responsibilities to family and community. Austen overcomes this difficulty by employing the classic comic form: When wedding bells are about to ring at the story’s conclusion,