ABSTRACT
In this essay, Laura M. White contextualises Jane Austen’s writings in an age in which Britain suffered constant economic upheaval, a series of disruptions caused by the war with France, an ungovernable national debt, banking crises, agricultural depressions, currency debasement, and inflation. This period of economic instability was also marked by dramatic changes in cultural attitudes about consumerism—this was the era in which modern notions of fashion, shopping, and the self as consumer emerged with force among Britain’s growing middle classes. The essay demonstrates that while Austen’s fiction addresses economic questions only in oblique and partial ways, her works do show significant traces of the age’s economic self-fashioning. In particular, Austen’s many scenes of shopping and her depiction of characters as forms of homo economicus show that Austen was clearly aware of the moral pitfalls shopping and fashion can occasion.
