Adkins, Roy & Lesley "Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England"

Adkins, Roy & Lesley "Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England: How our ancestors lived two centuries ago" (aka "Jane Austen's England) - 2013

Part of my #Reading Austen project is to read a book by the author in the uneven months and a book about the author and/or her books in the even ones. This is my October read.

And it was a very interesting and detailed book. We get several maps right at the beginning where we cannot just see where Jane Austen lived during her lifetime but also some other contemporary characters with a similar background. Something that always adds to the explanations in any book, fiction or non-fiction.

But it's not only that. They explain how the pounds, shillings and pennies were divided, how the weights and measurements were calculated, all those nitty-gritty bits that are in the books of that time but not explained because the readers would have known what it was. The same as what it meant when someone had £10,000 pounds a year. 

They tell us everything about weddings at the time, about the aristocracy and who was who, education was as much talked about as what was going on in home and kitchen. The fashion of the time (of which we read a lot in Jane's books) is described, the religion, work and hobbies, crimes, illnesses, just everything that was important to the people of the 19th century.

So, if you want to know more about Jane's life, this is the book for you.

From the back cover:

"Jane Austen, arguably the greatest novelist of the English language, lived from 1775 to 1817. Her fiction focuses on the gentry and aristocracy, and her heroines are young women looking for love. Yet the comfortable, tranquil country that she brilliantly devised is a complete contrast to the England in which she actually lived. For twenty-nine of Jane Austen's forty-one years, the country was embroiled in war.

Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England explores the real England of that time. Roy and Lesley Adkins vividly portray fascinating aspects of the daily lives of ordinary people, from forced marriages and the sale of wives in marketplaces to boys and girls working down mines or as chimney sweeps, this book eavesdrops on the daily chore of fetching water, the horror of ghosts and witches, Saint Monday, bull baiting, sedan chairs, highwaymen, the stench of corpses swinging on roadside gibbets and the horrors of surgery without anaesthetics.

Giving a voice to these forgotten people and revealing how they worked, played and struggled to survive, Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England is an authoritative and gripping account that is sometimes humorous, often shocking, but always entertaining."