In 1791, Jane Austen composed her History of England, covering about 250 years of English rule in about twenty-five pages: [...] Partial, superficial, moralizing, forgetful: Austen’s historian was himself the target of her satire, the critical effect of which registered a serious critique that she was early among her contemporaries to make. While a late eighteenth-century rise of nationalism was driving the popularity of totalizing versions of historical progress – narratives of the progress of nations and civilization – Austen’s satirical voice was debunking certain strategies of popular historical prose; it was also insisting that the past was important other than in the ways these histories were representing it. For Austen, representing the life of the mind as it encountered historical social change and constructed a relation to the past was as important as recording the conventional historical events.
Disturbing “the torpid tranquillity of the soul”: Austen’s Textual-Historical Critique
JVF Conference Papers
