Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray

Jane Austen is the queen and inventor of the Regency romance (courtship literature set in England's Regency period, 1811–1820). Jane Austen's six most famous works (Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion) highlight the strict social etiquette of her day and the legal limitations that women of her social class endured.

Austen is now so popular that even non-novel readers recognize the name from seeing it in various, unexpected places like tea mugs and dating guides. Her immediate Regency siblings and her future Victorian collateral descendants would faint at seeing their sister and aunt depicted like this. For they presented her as a near saint.

England has numerous sites where you can explore the life and work of Jane Austen. The following are just the tip of the iceberg. When you get to your hotel or bed and breakfast in London, find one of the many free maps with the underground and train stations clearly marked on them (each underground/subway line is in a different color!

For many Austen fans, reading one of her novels is taking an armchair vacation back to England in the early 1800s, known as the Regency. They see this period as a time of tea and etiquette. The Austen who conjures up such ideas may even inspire people to take up Regency dancing and Regency fashion. This is when Austen, the novelist, becomes to her readers "Jane," their friend.

Because of the charm of her plots, their setting in merry old England, and the Victorian-styled costumes and 1850 setting used in the first film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1940), you may view Austen as Victorian. (This isn't your fault . . . the 1940 film misled you!) But Jane Austen lived between 1775 and 1817, and her novels came out between 1813 and 1818, the year after her death, which places her and her work in the Georgian period of English history.