Austen’s French Revolution fears revealed

JANE AUSTEN is known for her work about the bucolic British countryside, full of class, courtship and small-time scandal.

However, her work was also inspired by the wartime events and riots that affected members of her family, including her cousin who fled the French Revolution and was caught up in unrest in London.

A new book by Professor Thomas Keymer, an Austen specialist at Toronto University, explores the little-known political aspects of Austen’s work.

In particular, a riot scene in her novel Northanger Abbey is thought to have been inspired by her glamorous cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, the wife of a French Royalist who was guillotined in Paris and who was caught up in the Mount Street riot of 1792. Austen was terrified and writes a colourful letter about it.

“The noise of the populace, the drawn swords and pointed bayonets of the guards, the fragments of brick and mortar thrown on every side, one of which had nearly killed my coachman, the firing at one end of the street.”

This then found its way into her novel, in which there is talk of “something very shocking” in London, and one character immediately starts imagining the worst: “A mob of three thousand men assembling in St George’s Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood.”

Prof Keymer explained: “In both periods, when she originally drafts it and revises it for publication there’s all this anxiety about revolution that might happen. There’s lots of debate about whether she was making political points or not. She often was writing about politics in a deft way but without nailing her colours to the mast.”

While her work is mostly set in the countryside, the events in London and abroad influenced her novels, he added. Though she didn’t explicitly state her views, she made her readers think about politics at the time.

‘She was often writing about politics in a deft way but without nailing her colours to the mast’