Jane Austen's England

Jane Austen wrote about the English gentry class in the late Georgian and Regency periods (1796–1816). Her novels follow her heroines’ quests for true love and fulfilment in English society during a period of great upheaval. But how accurate were Jane Austen’s depictions of life in England? Was marriage really the only ambition for women at that time? Were all men as dominant and powerful as Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park? Was London really as corrupt and immoral a place as that book ...