Issue 10
- As Sarah Emsley points out, her heroines seek husbands, and in most cases the husband’s appeal is inextricably linked with the idea of his home. The novels end happily in emotional and financial security for the heroines
- In the Regency era, was there real security outside fiction? Then as now, there were challenges. No fewer than four of Jane’s sisters-in-law were to die in childbirth and Kathleen Charon uses her medical expertise to explain why childbirth was so hazardous
- If you survived being fruitful, was the pastoral scene one of idyllic “mellow fruitfulness”, a focus for our nostalgic yearning? Not if you had to milk the cows, churn butter and make a daily living from your dairy herd, as Sharon Wagoner points out in her lively article on Mr Martin’s cows
- Then there is the hard graft: of cultivating the landscape into a “prettyish kind of wilderness”
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