Jane Austen chronicles the subtleties and nuances of- and the aspirations and machinations at work in - her own social milieu. Through the stories of her spirited heroines and their circles, their interactions and rituals, their movements from ballrooms to drawing rooms, from London and Bath to parklands and gardens, she recreates the life of The English gentry that she observed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of her novels is a love story and a story about marriage - marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not romances; ironic, comic, wise and penetrating, they are brilliant portrayals of the society Jane Austen knew.