Reply to Why did Jane Austen never mention the Napoleonic wars in her novels?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]She absolutely mentions it -- where do you think all those army officers and naval officers come from? -- but it's in the background of her stories, not the main focus.  My guess is that the wars didn't have the same kind of effect on the home front as later wars did.  [/quote]

+1, she is also interested in other wold events and brings them into her stories in other ways. For instance, drawing the abolition movement and the issue of the slave trade in British colonies in the Caribbean into Mansfield Park. I remember being interested about the reference when I first read the book in high school, having never really thought that much about how slavery was viewed outside the US or how other countries, especially colonizing countries, were very heavily implicated by the obvious moral problem posed by slavery.

So I was also interested later to discover that the the reference was very much intentional and that abolition was a particular interest of Austen's: https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/volume-41-no-2/huff/

She was a very curious and perceptive person who was well read and extremely curious about how the world works. While her books focus on the minutia of every day life in her small corner of the world, she doesn't shy away from allowing the broader events of the time to come in and influence that world, even when individual characters would prefer that they not. In fact that tension between characters who wish to maintain a very specific social and political order and the inevitable messiness of human life is central to all of Austen's work on one level or another.

She did not write with blinders on.[/quote]

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