Jane Austen and the War of Ideas

It is often said that Jane Austen in the countryside remained isolated from the great events of her time. But as Marilyn Butler points out in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Austen was not isolated from reading novels, and novels carried controversy. The sentimental novel of the previous generation, the Jacobin novel of William Godwin, the philosophical comedy of Robert Bage and Maria Edgeworth--all conveyed their own kind of ideological meaning. By recognizing Austen's relationship to the literature of ideas, Butler offers acute readings of each of the novels and an intellectual context in which to see them as a whole.