In the small village of Steventon, Hampshire, a baby girl was born on December 16, 1775 to a family on the lower fringes of the gentry. That baby girl’s name was Jane Austen. No one would have predicted during her youth or childhood, or even during the course of her entire life, that the incisive spinster would be recognized widely as one of the greatest English prose novelists of all time as a result of her half dozen masterworks that used the setting of gentry young women seeking economic security and love through marriage as a way to explore deep societal issues in an elegant way without overt moralization. In many ways, the life of Jane Austen was highly ironic–she was a daughter of a church rector who managed to pierce through the superficial religiosity of many of her contemporaries, she deeply hated the immoral behavior of the prince regent but her work remains the most notable remnant of the regency period and she was basically ordered to write one of her novels and dedicate it to one of the biggest fans of her work, the Prince Regent. There is the sad irony of an unmarried woman in genteel poverty writing novels about beautiful women and their relatively wealthy marriage partners, and of an obscure and poor woman in her lifetime who did not greatly profit from her work receiving massive fame after her death.

There is another irony of her work that relates more specifically to my own intellectual interests as a military historian who also is an open and unabashed Janeite (which I suppose must seem a bit odd). On the day that Jane Austen was born, the British War Office made the following proclamation:

War Office, December 16, 1775.

IT is His Majesty’s Pleasure, that, from the date hereof, and during the continuance of the Rebellion now subsisting in North America, every person, who shall enlist as a soldier in any of His Majesty’s Marching Regiments of Foot, shall be entitled to his discharge at the end of Three Years, or at the end of the said Rebellion, at the option of His Majesty.

By His Majesty’s Command,

Barrington [1].

As it would happen, this proclamation has a great deal to do with the course of Jane Austen’s life. On December 16, 1775, the British government announced a bounty of a guinea and a half (nothing to sneeze at) for those who would volunteer to crush the rebellion of the American colonists (who had not officially declared independence and would not for more than six months). Jane Austen, genteel novelist of marriage comedies, lived nearly her entire life in the shadow of war. Her early childhood was taken up by the American Revolution, and her adulthood was lived in the shadow of the wars over the French Revolution (including the long Napoleonic wars). These wars took many men out of the marriage market and put them in the way of French bullets or cannons, and both reinforced and challenged the existing social structure.

Also, in ways that have seldom been recognized, Jane Austen’s work reflects the reality of war, both in the desperation of women for suitable marriage partners for both love and economic security as well as in the social realities of the militarism. For example, Austen’s novels are peppered with references to Colonels Brandon and Fitzwilliam, General and Captain Tilney, and the like, traditional members of the English gentry who leverage their social standing to high rank within the local militias whose job it was to preserve social order (namely one that preserved their own ranks and privileges against the threats of egalitarian uprisings) even as the navy (which led to the advancement of two of her own brothers to Admiral) showed the way for ambitious and talented young men like William Price and Frederick Wentworth to rise above the modest status of their birth. Given the fact that the young and handsome and dashing members of the gentry were often deeply involved in military affairs, and that those who were closeby were either likely to be clergymen or military men, it is small wonder that many a boy-crazy female member of the gentry would be attracted to dashing officers in their regimental costumes, as many young women are still turned on by the sight of a man in uniform today. Not much has changed in the last two hundred years.

And it is the way in which Jane Austen uses her intricate and deep knowledge of the culture of her own time, very narrowly focusing on those aspects of her culture that she knows best–gentry families struggling to marry off daughters, people searching for both love and economic security, dances and balls and social occasions–in order to demonstrate timeless truths about human character that makes her such a notable author, and makes her enduring popularity so well deserved. I would only wish that she could have profited from her genius during her own lifetime as she so richly deserved. Sometimes, though, it takes a while for greatness to show itself, and Miss Jane Austen simply was not allotted enough time on earth to see her success lead to wealth and recognition of her God-given talents as an authoress.

[1] http://www.mccargar.com/WarOffice_Proclamation.html