It is often said that Jane Austen in the countryside remained isolated from the great events of her time. But as Marilyn Butler points out in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Austen was not isolated from reading novels, and novels carried controversy. The sentimental novel of the previousgeneration, the Jacobin novel of William Godwin, the philosophical comedy of Robert Bage and Maria Edgeworth--all conveyed their own kind of ideological meaning...