we know that the two sets of main characters have made marriages of affection (Elizabeth’s sister Jane and Mr. Bingley) or even passion (Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy) and that these happy unions actually enhance the stability of society. That it appears to the reader 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 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