Jane Austen wrote six of the best-loved novels in the English language, as well as a smaller corpus of unpublished works. Her books pioneered new techniques for representing voices, minds, and hearts in narrative prose, and, despite some accusations of a blinkered domestic and romantic focus, they
represent the world of their characters with unsparing clarity. Here, Tom Keymer explores the major themes throughout Austen's novels, setting them in the literary, social, and political backgrounds from which they emerge, and showing how they engage with social tensions in an era dominated by the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The Jane Austen who emerges is a writer shaped by the literary experiments and socio-political debates of her time, increasingly drawn to a fundamentally conservative vision of social harmony, yet forever complicating this vision through her disruptive
ironies and satirical energy.