A time of battles – real and literary

Walter Scott, Byron, Jane Austen – all were profoundly affected by the conflict with France. Jenny Uglow considers the world of wartime reading, and cultural skirmishes, high and low

• Jenny Uglow - The Guardian, Friday 24 October 2014 

Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, from 2005. Photograph: Allstar

I’ve been following the lives of different people – farmers and builders, bankers and weavers, paupers and aristos – throughout the Napoleonic wars, as we have come to call them. The conflict lasted 22 years from 1793 to 1815, broken briefly by the Peace of Amiens in 1802-03. One in five families were directly affected and more men died, proportionately, than in the first world war. Against this background, as if trudging through inclement weather, people struggled to get on with their lives, but if private interests often blocked out wider issues the war affected everyone – including writers and readers.
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