For Northanger Abbey, probably the first book she prepared for publication, Jane Austen provided an ‘Advertisement’ by the ‘Authoress’, pointing out the quotidian nature of the background and details of her fiction. She was readying the work for publication in 1816 just after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, during the last year of her life, but she had, she declared, completed it in 1803, having actually conceived it even earlier. She wrote:

Attuned as she was to ‘places, manners, books, and opinions’, she knew that fashions and hairstyles had altered in thirteen years and that the muslins in style in 1803 were no longer desired in 1816. ( Jane Austen, although not keen on shopping, showed herself in her letters intensely interested in clothes.) She knew that the political and literary scene varied from year to year and that, when the naive and fiction-obsessed Catherine Morland suggests that ‘something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London’, it is quite reasonable for her to be thinking of Gothic fiction and for her more serious friend Eleanor Tilney to assume that she means riots in London, such as were happening in the 1790s. Praising Jane Austen for subordinating her material ‘to principles of Economy and Selection’ and declaring ‘nothing is dragged in, nothing is superfluous’, George Henry Lewes also noted in her books an ‘ease of nature, which looks so like the ordinary life of everyday’. The appearance is in part given by the careful, spare use of material objects and literary and political allusions.

This volume of entries on aspects of Jane Austen's life, works and historical context necessarily speaks to the interests of the twenty-first century: it treats nationalism and empire as well as transport and the professions, print culture along with dress and manners, the agricultural background of her life as well as the literary.