Historical approaches to Jane Austen have often had the paradoxical effect of sidelining her from history altogether. With an irony she herself would have enjoyed, the old and long-standing icon of a writer untouched by events has been broken up only to make way for the portrait of a misty-eyed reactionary. Over the last decades the idea that Austen was bent on reviling the French Revolution and all its works has stuck, and since the position has never been systematically challenged, even her fervent defenders have been saddled with the sense that she is a figure out of key with her time, while for others she appears as the arch party-pooper, darting withering looks at each fresh trend and cult. Though dissent on the part of her contemporaries is commonly taken as a mark of constructive engagement, in her case it is rarely seen as anything other than defensive, the product of denial, or even of ignorance. The military tactics promisingly assigned to her subject by Marilyn Butler in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas turn out, in the end, to be those of siege rather than battle. Far from being granted the dignity of a resourceful campaigner, Austen the Anti-Jacobin comes over as a lodger in the keep, time-warped for once and all by her early exposure to ‘old-fashioned’ sermons and conduct-books.