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Sex, slavery and royal scandal: how Jane Austen's novels exposed a darker side of Georgian Britain

Sex, slavery and royal scandal: how Jane Austen's novels exposed a darker side of Georgian Britain

The author's books depict an evocative slice of early 19th-century life, but many aspects of the Regency era are only hinted at in her novels, as Lizzie Rogers reveals

An engraving showing a young woman in a pale blue dress, wearing a frilly bonnet on her head

Dr Lizzie Rogers

Published: December 22, 2025 at 4:00 PM

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Ever felt like you could be Elizabeth Bennet? You’re not alone. Entering Jane Austen’s world can feel like an immersive experience. Reading her books (or watching television or film adaptations, or the many spin-offs and lookalikes), it’s easy to believe that somehow we’ve really got to know her England – and, by extension, the people who lived in it.

That feeling is encapsulated in the 2008 ITV series Lost in Austen, which follows the adventures of 21st-century heroine Amanda Price. Stepping through a portal into the world of Pride and Prejudice, Price (played by Jemima Rooper) finds herself in the bosom of the Bennet family, messing up episodes in the novel, trying – with varying degrees of success – to fix them and, inevitably, falling in love with Mr Darcy (Elliot Cowan). Her opening voiceover declares that “I’ve read [Pride and Prejudice] so many times now the words just say themselves in my head and it’s like a window opening. It’s like I’m actually there – it’s become a place I know so intimately… I can see that world, I can touch it.”

A photograph of a modern-day adaptation of a Regency ball. A couple dance in the middle, with the man spinning the woman around. Around them, several other couples dance

A scene from ITV’s Lost in Austen, where 21st-century heroine Amanda Price steps into Pride and Prejudice, which she describes as “a place I know so intimately” (Image by Shutterstock)

This is far from a new sentiment. In March 1826, after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time, the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal that Austen “had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with… the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment... What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.”

Her undeniable talent for character study is one of the key reasons why Austen’s work resonates so loudly across the world. Creative retellings of her novels show how the themes, characters and plotlines easily transcend their bounds of Regency England and fit well in other countries, other cultures and other times, with new representations amending the ages, social class and genders of characters. In the 250 years since Austen’s birth, her work has morphed into a behemoth that we simultaneously modernise and have made emblematic of life in late 18th and early 19th-century England.

An image showing an old man with a straight face, wearing a suit and coat

A 19th-century engraving of author Sir Walter Scott, who wrote glowingly of Austen’s writing after reading Pride and Prejudice for the third time (Image by Getty Images)

Obscuring obsession

Thanks to her gift for evoking that era, its environment and inhabitants, it’s easy to envision ourselves inside her world. We feel able to enter it through the plots of her novels and their adaptations for stage and screen, as well as the extension of her unfinished novel Sanditon, fleshed out vividly in the ITV series running from 2019. But there is a danger that we conflate her writing too fully with the history of the time, obscuring swathes of this period through our obsession. The picture we receive is one that’s been enhanced by layers of interpretation, adaptation and the historical distance between us and the source material. The effect of them all together is “to make us read novels that aren’t actually there”, argued Helena Kelly in her 2016 book Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, echoing the views of other Austen scholars. Because Austen’s work feels so modern and accessible, we miss wider perspectives that are alluded to through her clever study of the world around her – but also, importantly, many that she simply could not give us and did not have to.

One person cannot capture every aspect of life in their era, nor act as the singular voice of a generation. No matter how brilliant or important the writer in question is, they cannot speak to the experience of everybody. Yes, Jane Austen was a genius, through whose pen the novel was changed forever. She defied her circumstances in life – being a woman with very little money – to become one of the world’s best-loved authors, thanks solely to her immense talent. And she does open a window into this period of history from which we can learn so much – but her work, and the questions it raises, invites us to widen our gaze. Our knowledge of both her and the time in which she lived is only enriched by expanding our understanding by exploring the work of other writers and figures that populated her world, opening our eyes to that diverse, fast-changing and momentous era.

A black and white pictures showing large groups of people in states of undress, fighting and drinking in the street

William Hogarth’s Gin Lane provides a stark portrayal of a teeming urban environment in which drunkenness and debauchery were rife (Image by Getty Images)

Fascinated by the intelligent satire of Austen’s novels, we might look at the art of William Hogarth. Though he died in 1764, more than a decade before the author’s birth, many of his images of 18th-century London highlight the blight of corruption and the terrible conditions endured by Britain’s urban poor well into the 19th century. His famous prints Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751) could be seen as demonising the drinking habits of the working class. But his work does at least feature ordinary folk as more than just background elements. A portrait of his own servants from the early 1750s, for instance, presents distinct faces and personalities.

Hogarth offers an unforgiving depiction of the terrible conditions endured by Britain’s urban poor

Hogarth’s father spent time in debtors’ prison, a place more often associated with the Victorian work of Charles Dickens, and many other figures from the Georgian period also found themselves inmates. The actress and writer Mary Robinson (c1757–1800), who later became famous for her portrayal of Perdita in A Winter’s Tale (and for her brief affair with the Prince of Wales), lived with her profligate husband in debtors’ prison for several months from 1775; while there, she became the family breadwinner by publishing her poetry.

Read more | Beyond the podcast: Jane Austen

Robinson’s memoirs, prepared from 1798 and published the year after her death, charted a life beset with immense ups and downs. They give us an insight into her youth and first marriage (“I considered chastity as the brightest ornament that could embellish the female mind,” she writes) and trace the struggles that continued to beset her into her later years. In fact, much of the preparations for those memoirs was done on envelopes because she couldn’t afford to buy fresh paper.

Crime and poverty

To continue our trip into the murkier corners of London during this period, consider the business dealings, crime and poverty prevalent in lower-class areas of the city. One publication that illustrates this side of urban life was Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a salacious bestseller published annually from 1757 to 1794 that detailed names and talents of dozens of sex workers. It was interrogated by Hallie Rubenhold in her 2005 book The Covent Garden Ladies, which itself inspired the television series Harlots (2017–19). These aspects of London are hinted at in Pride and Prejudice, in the form of the poverty and depravity that Mrs Bennet fears will be the fate of her daughter Lydia after she runs away to the capital with George Wickham.

A drawing of a black man with one leg, dressed in a blue jacket, checked shirt and a feathered hat, playing the violin

An early 19th-century illustration of sailor-turned-street performer Billy Waters, whose life “highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period” (Image by Alamy)

Strength in diversity

Sanditon introduces Austen’s only black character: Miss Lambe, an heiress from the West Indies. During the 18th century, it is estimated there were more than 20,000 black Britons – a significant number, in a British population that had exceeded 10 million by 1801. To explore the lives of some of these people, read Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History (2022) and Mary L Shannon’s biography Billy Waters Is Dancing (2024). The latter gives a voice to a black sailor in Regency Britain whose presence as a street performer was so famed across London that his name became legendary, his life shaped by those who aimed to profit from his talent. Living from around the 1770s until 1823, Waters’ life maps closely onto Austen’s, and highlights the complex intersection of race and disability during this period.

Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Jane Austen's England

Mansfield Park, Austen’s third and perhaps most divisive novel, makes clear the links between slavery, the country house and aristocratic wealth. The titular house is built on a fortune sustained by plantations worked by enslaved people in Antigua, and its name may come from Lord Mansfield, whose judicial decisions enabled the advancement towards the abolition of slavery.

Austen’s favourite poet was William Cowper, whose work fervently supported antislavery campaigns. But there were also first-person accounts of the experiences of black people in Britain in that period.

An open book with a portrait of a black man in a suit on the left page, and a title page on the right

First-person accounts written by the formerly enslaved – such as the letters of Ignatius Sancho (above) – helped rally Britons to the cause of abolition (Image by Alamy)

The letters of Ignatius Sancho, born into slavery on an Atlantic ship in 1729 and brought to England at two years old, were published in 1782, after his death. One of them – written to John Wingrave, a London bookseller, in 1778 – contains a stinging rebuke of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. “I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love – and for its freedom, and for the many blessings I enjoy in it, shall ever have my warmest wishes – prayers – and blessings;) I say, it is with reluctance that I must observe your country’s conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East – West Indies – and even on the coast of Guinea.”

Olaudah Equiano was another high profile supporter of the British abolitionist movement whose writings shone a light on the iniquities of the slave trade. His Interesting Narrative autobiography – telling the story of his enslavement in Africa, arrival in Britain as a young man and life after purchasing his freedom in 1766 – was hugely popular when it was published in 1789.

The enslaved female poet Phillis Wheatley revealed in verse her desire for intellectual fulfilment. Travelling to London from Boston with her enslavers, she was able to publish Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773 – believed to be the first set of poems published by an African American. Such writings enable us to understand experiences of black people during the era, reminding us of the often-forgotten diversity of England at this time.

In this vein, the second season of Bridgerton (2022) highlighted – albeit through a fictionalised lens – the experiences of south Asian people in Britain. During Jane Austen’s lifetime, the British empire was in rapid ascendency, fuelled by commerce, trade and the ruthless actions of the East India Company. The author’s own cousin, Eliza Hancock – who later married Jane’s brother Henry – grew up in India as the daughter of a British surgeon to the East India Company.

An illustration of three workers working in a factory, turning large wheels with cloth hanging over them into buckets

An 18th-century illustration of workers dyeing cloth. Jane Austen lived through a boom in industry, but others would document the struggles of the labouring poor (Image by Getty Images)

Long-lost sister

William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, which was set during the Regency period though published in 1848, highlights through the character of Jos Sedley the wealth that could be accumulated by young people capitalising on travelling to India. Historian Durba Ghosh has noted that Thackeray had a long-lost (and possibly mixed-heritage) sister, Amelia – also known as Sarah Redfield – in India, and explored the stories of many south Asian women, demonstrating the strong connections between Britain and India at the time.

Read more | Strange and surprising pastimes of the Regency Ton

Thackeray’s dramatic novel is more specifically set during the Napoleonic Wars, hinted at in Austen’s work through the regular presence of a militia or naval characters, though this inclusion is often overlooked as a reflection of the lived experience of constant war and unrest. Two of Austen’s brothers were in the navy and one was in a militia regiment, while her cousin Eliza lost her first husband, the Comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine. The absence of peace and a sense of perpetual uncertainty were harrowing facts of life. This tumult extended to Britain’s shores as violence broke out over questions of religion and parliamentary representation.

This tumult extended to Britain’s shores as violence broke out over questions of religion and the vote

Through the late 18th and early 19th century, villages, towns and cities grew rapidly while at the same time the voices of ordinary people were not heard. Burgeoning industry created a new class of wealthy people, while also fostering extremely testing working conditions for the labouring poor. We tend to think of these subjects as uniquely endemic to the Victorian period, taking centre stage in the writing of Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, but the boom in industry was firmly rooted in Austen’s lifetime. For instance, Lancashire’s cotton industry was in full swing by the late 18th century, with some 20,000 apprentices working in cotton mills in 1800.

A painting of a woman with a white band tied around her hair, holding a book

Mary Wollstonecraft often strayed beyond social norms, and her writings on women’s rights caused a sensation (Image by Alamy)

Textile magnate Robert Peel (1750–1830), long-term MP for Tamworth and father of the future prime minister of the same name, began campaigning and introducing legislation on child labour in the early years of the 19th century. Spending time in London, Bath and Southampton, Jane Austen would have been offered significant insights into the growth of industry and urban overcrowding. We celebrate Austen’s novels for the questions she raises about the position of women in society, a subject that preoccupied many of her contemporaries. Early feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft argued fervently for the recognition of women as rational creatures who deserved rights accordingly in a world that granted them few, if any. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects she wrote: “One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers.”

Wollstonecraft argued fervently for the recognition of women as rational creatures

Wollstonecraft’s words caused a sensation – and when, after her premature death in 1797, her husband, William Godwin published her biography, so did the story of her life. She lived frequently outside the bounds of accepted social propriety – a point that enables us to delve deeper into the world of reputation, of making spaces to safely subvert societal expectations and legal doctrine, and of understanding how relationships, freedom and restriction truly worked in practice.

A detail from a postcard showing the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler. Their relationship attracted a lot of attention in late 18th-century Britain (Image by Getty Images)

The third season of Sanditon (2023) presented a slow-burn romance between two gay men, Arthur Parker and Lord Harry Montrose – the storyline breathing a small piece of fictional life into the rich LGBTQ+ history of this period. A visible real-life example can be found in the cottage named Plas Newydd in Llangollen, Wales where from 1780 the couple Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler created a sanctuary for queer happiness. They became famous within their own lifetimes, visited by Sir Walter Scott and given a royal pension by George III upon the intercession of Queen Charlotte.

We cannot – and should not expect to – learn everything about the history of the Regency period from the pages of Jane Austen’s novels. But as fans, readers and historians, we are indebted to her for providing a gateway into this tumultuous period, into which new research is being undertaken all the time, shining light on previously unheard voices and hidden faces. It is all these lived experiences that weave a rich tapestry, helping us to better know the period in which Jane Austen lived – one that indelibly shaped her and the masterpieces she left behind.

Authors

Dr Lizzie RogersHistorian and writer

Dr Lizzie Rogers is an historian and writer who specialises in women, learning and historic houses in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and their depiction in popular culture.