Jane Austen arguably the greatest novelist of the English language lived from 1775 to 1817. Her fiction focuses on the gentry & aristocracy & her heroines are young women looking for love. Yet the comfortable tranquil country that she brilliantly devised is a complete contrast to the England in which she actually lived. For twenty-nine of Jane Austen's forty-one years the country was embroiled in war. Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England explores the real England of that time. Roy & Lesley Adkins vividly portray fascinating aspects of the daily lives of ordinary people from forced marriages & the sale of wives in marketplaces to boys & girls working down mines or as chimney sweeps this book eavesdrops on the daily chore of fetching water the horror of ghosts & witches Saint Monday bull baiting sedan chairs highwaymen the stench of corpses swinging on roadside gibbets & the horrors of surgery without anaesthetics. Giving a voice to these forgotten people & revealing how they worked played & struggled to survive Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England is an authoritative & gripping account that is sometimes humorous often shocking but always entertaining.