Sunday's "LifeEtc." section had an interesting, but somewhat misleading, article on Jane Austen's England by Gary Warner. Gary writes of Jane Austen's "tussles with Victorian manners and morals" along with a photograph of buildings that purport to "... hark back to the Victorian times of Jane Austen's novels."
The Victorian period only "began" 20 years after Jane Austen died in 1817. The quite young Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Austen clearly could not have been a "Victorian" writer.
Austen wrote during what is called the Regency Period — generally considered between 1800 and 1820 when the regency ended and George IV was crowned king. The Regency period that is the background for all of Austen's novels was one of considerable debauchery that was primarily associated with the group surrounding the future King George IV. In Austen's novels, there is really nothing about the future king and his friends, nor anything really about the wars of Napoleon that raged until 1815. Austen wrote about people and was amazingly silent about what was happening in the greater world outside her small group of imagined interesting people.
Jim Moss
Bountiful