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Title:
The History of England
Series:
----------
Author: Jane Austen
Rating:
2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Juvenilia short story
Pages:
28
Words: 7K
This is just what you’d expect from a snarky teen writing about a subject they didn’t want to be writing about. I just rolled my eyes and plowed through.
★★✬☆☆
From Wikipedia.org
The work is a burlesque which pokes fun at widely used schoolroom history books such as Oliver Goldsmith's 1771 The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II. Austen mockingly imitates the style of textbook histories of English monarchs, while ridiculing historians' pretensions to objectivity. It was illustrated with coloured portraits by Austen's elder sister Cassandra, to whom the work is dedicated.
The second page of the History reads:
The History of England
from the reign of
Henry the 4th
to the death of
Charles the 1st
By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian
To Miss Austen, eldest daughter of the Revd
George Austen, this work is inscribed with
all due respect by
The Author
N.B. There will be very few Dates in
this History.
Her History cites as sources works of fiction such as the plays of Shakespeare and Sheridan, a novel by Charlotte Turner Smith and the opinions of Austen's family and friends. Along with accounts of English kings and queens which contain little factual information but a great deal of comically exaggerated opining about their characters and behaviour, the work includes material such as charades and puns on names.
While the work offers her family humorous vignettes on English rulers from Henry II to Charles I, many entries focus on royal women, such as Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, and Mary, Queen of Scots, who are denied entries but are significant figures in English history. Mary, Queen of Scots, in particular plays an important role in Austen's History, which also acts as a vindication of the executed cousin of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I is treated as a tyrant, rather than a good leader, thus showing Austen's affinity for Mary and the Stuart monarchs.
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