Austen herself made delirious fun of this kind of nonsense when she was young. Her juvenilia—the satirical skits and sketches she produced as a girl for the entertainment of her large, literate, fun-loving family, some of which were written when she was no more than twelve—are full of wicked parodies of this fashionable fluff. In one story, two young heroines, highly sensitive in the accepted style, “faint alternately on a sofa.” In another, an infant girl is discovered, perfectly unharmed and already able to talk, under a haystack. In a third, a young man has “so dazzling a Beauty that none but Eagles could look him in the Face.” People fall in love at the drop of a hat, children pilfer their parents’ savings, and a man discovers four long-lost grandchildren in rapid succession.

In other words, Austen knew exactly what she was doing when she created her fiction of ordinary life. It didn’t happen by default, as if she never really thought about it and simply did what came naturally. It was a revolutionary artistic choice, a courageous defiance of convention and expectation: exactly why so many of her early readers had trouble appreciating what she had done, and why her fame took so long to establish itself.

Yet she did more than reject the literary formulas of her day. Her own life may have seemed uneventful: she lived in a quiet corner of the English countryside, never married, never traveled more than about a hundred miles from home, didn’t publish her first novel until she was thirty-five, and died, still sharing a house with her mother and sister, just six years later. But she lived amid a host of dramatic events, both global in scope and closer to home. Born in 1775, the year that launched the American Revolution, she was a teenager during the French Revolution and an adult during the Napoleonic Wars—a quarter century of epic struggle between Great Britain and France that climaxed at Waterloo just two years before her death. Her life also coincided with the most dynamic phase of the conquest of India, and thus, the rise of the British Empire.