"Jane and the Genius of the Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barron Stephanie)
Editor's Foreword
BRITISH NOVELIST JANE AUSTEN WAS BORN ON THE EVE of her country's conflict with its American colonies, in 1775, and died only two years after Napoleon's second abdication in 1815; yet the turmoil of England's passage through more than four decades of revolution and warfare is barely evident in her novels. As a result, her fiction has too often been dismissed as superficial or as reflecting the purely “female” preoccupations of domestic life. An Austen scholar might be quick to point out the naval influences in Persuasion, or argue that the subtle shifts in social practices and mores that Austen repeatedly chronicles could exist only in the broader context of political transformation — but in the main, her fiction mentions military figures most often as they appear at a ball, and politics not at all.
Austen's letters, however, reveal her to have been anything but ignorant of the affairs of her day. As Warren Roberts points out in his engrossing work, Jane Austen and the French Revolution(Macmillan, 1979), the novelist habitually read the London newspapers and commented on the political news reported in them. She followed the battles and engagements of the Royal Navy with avid interest, having two brothers serving in ships of the line, and she spent the entire summer of 1805 near the coastline of Kent — Napoleon's ground zero for invasion.
What a delight, therefore, to discover in this, the fourth of the long-lost Austen journals to be edited for publication, an account of Jane's life during a period known to her contemporaries as the Great Terror. For over two years, from May 1803 until August 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte planned the invasion of England with a passion bordering on mania. He beggared his treasury to build a flotilla of over a thousand ships, massed an army of one hundred thousand troops in the ports of the Channel coast, and goaded his reluctant naval commanders into attempting to breach the remarkably effective British blockade of France. Never, since the Norman Conquest, had Britain faced so serious a threat of invasion from its neighbor; never again, until the Bat-tie of Britain in September 1940, would she confront so potent a military force, merely twenty miles from Dover.
Jane Austen witnessed the denouement of Napoleon's grand scheme from the idyllic vantage of her brother Edward Austen Knight's principal estate, Godmersham Park in Kent. The compelling events of those days— which coincided with Canterbury's Race Week — are here recounted for the first time.
In editing this manuscript for publication, I found Alan Schom's Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle, 1803–1805 (Oxford University Press, 1990) an invaluable guide to the period. But nothing can exceed the pleasure of my brief walk through the grounds of Godmersham itself, with its sheep-filled meadows roiling down to the Stour, on a hot afternoon in July.