Marilyn Butler places the Romantics into their proper historical setting. She relates the events and developments of the time--the French and American Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, the expansion of agriculture, trade, and industry, growing economic and social pressures--to the cultural forces which shaped these writers. She reveals common factors which engaged the separate efforts of so many truly individual creative minds, and the fierce personal...

An analysis of Jane Austen's art in the light of the intellectual ferment of her times argues that she represents a conservative reaction against more permissive, individualistic, and personally expressive types of fiction of earlier years.