In an otherwise clever 2016 book that generated tremendous talk about Austen outside of academic circles, the author stated that “Jane was the only novelist of this period to write novels that were set more or less in the present day and more or less in the real world—or, at any rate, a world recognizable to her readers as the one in which they actually lived.” I gasped when I read that line, thinking about when Edgeworth’s Patronage—published in 1814, between Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814)—caused an uproar in London because readers of the time placed “the action
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LOL, I gasped too. Many novelists wrote novels "in the present day", with subtitles like "A tale founded on facts".
