What is the Regency Era?

    As I said in the last post, the Regency Era will play an important role in this scholarly discussion of female authors and readers during Jane Austen’s life. Therefore, it will be helpful to have a little bit of context of what exactly the Regency Era was, when it occurred, and what it meant to live during this time. 

    By the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, the societal, cultural, and political climates of Britain had undergone several changes from the climates of the earlier 18th century. As Anne K. Mellor phrases it, “The Terror in France, Napoleon's campaigns, and the paranoid British political response, coupled with the illness of the reigning monarch George III,” made hoping for a more liberated and free society in England difficult for many people (Mellor 43). This was the societal foundation upon which the Regency Period began.

    Though the official beginning of the Regency Era is typically placed in the year 1811—the year King George III officially went insane and his son, George, Prince of Wales, became the Regent of England—the Regency Era is generally referred to as the early decades of the 19th century up to 1837 when Queen Victoria’s reign began (Aschkenes). Despite some of the hardships England faced leading up to and during the Regency Era, the Regency of George, Prince of Wales brought to England a rather prosperous time in the world of arts and science. This was at least partly due to the fact that George was a supporter of the arts and sciences, but as Deborah Aschkenes a member of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University also points out,  “By 1800, almost everyone in the middle classes and above could read, and literacy rates for the rest of the population rose steadily thereafter,” (Aschkenes). Along with this increase in literacy rates came an increase in the popularity of the novel. This rise in popularity occurred just in time for Jane Austen to begin writing, and later publishing, her novels, but we will come back to that in a later post. 

    One final aspect of note in the Regency Era that will also come back into the discussion in a later post is the traditional societal gender roles. I will go more in depth on this with the future discussions of female readers and writers during this time, but in general, England in the early 19th century was a very patriarchal society. For the most part, women in the Regency Era had very few rights. In an article titled “‘Woman’s Place’ in Jane Austen’s England,” the late Barbara Swords, a former professor of English at Elmhurst University described women as, “oppressed victims of a patriarchal society, subordinate first to their fathers and, then, to their husbands,” (Swords). Though this description may not be completely on par with some of the characters in Jane Austen’s novel, it is important for us as scholars to know and understand the traditional expectations and rights of women at the time in order for us to truly analyze and interpret Jane Austen’s message in her writing.