DISCOVERING REGENCY ENGLAND

"In her novels, Jane Austen brilliantly portrayed the lives of the middle and upper classes, but barely mentioned the cast of characters who constituted the bulk of the population," Roy and Lesley Adkins write in their book, Jane Austen's England.
The authors offer a detailed analysis of early 19^th-century England, producing an  enlightening textbook of the life of both rich privileged and poor ordinary people who were the background in all of Jane Austen's books.

Without a doubt  Jane Austen wrote superb stories of the middle and upper class society set during the Regency  (here you can find an overview of that period), yet this book depicts the world which surrounded her during forty-one years of life. With the aid of diaries, newspaper articles, legal documents, memoirs and histories, it describes Jane Austen and her life,  but what's more it concentrates on the everyday lives of the middle and lower classes, who comprised three-quarters of the British population, including the great novelist herself.

Here you can read a newspaper article about Roy and Lesley Adkins' book.