England/Austen Question (oh Liiiiiinndaaaa…)

I will do my best ladies. You are correct there are many shires in England and I am from one of them, hence my name on this forum MissingtheShires. I am from Warwickshire, and some others are Leicestershire, Worcestershire, Bedfordshire etc – In the days when Jane Austen wrote authors wanted to keep the place somewhat vague and not have a place perfectly pinned down for people to recognise. Consequently “—-shire” could mean whatever the reader wanted it to mean. The shires are all beautiful and have similar attributes,and life in the shires would have been similar and interchangeable, so I think authors did this to simplify things for themselves. They would do the same thing with the names “Lord___” or “Prime Minister____” because again they would not want to use someone of the day who would be recognized and maybe she had perhaps written something inaccurate. So really it was to protect herself or whichever author used this device to protect themselves from mistakes. For example my county of Warwickshire has similarities to Worcestershire but those of us who live there would know if something that was from one place was attributed to another – and of course where people were concerned the authors did not want to make gross errors that could cause offence or issues. They did it also with regiments and military matters, because some regiments were considered more honorable than others and so as to not cause offense they would leave it blank. Hope this helps a bit. I love the shire of my birth and Jane Austen spent some time in the shires herself Hampshire, so she perhaps like me had a fondness for the shires. Linda

I only know some of this stuff because I lived there and because I had an awesome British Lit professor in college. Linda

I had wondered the same thing. Since I was reading a free Kindle version, I wasn’t even sure if it was supposed to be that way, or if something got lost in the digital translation. So, thanks for asking, LillyLou, and thanks for answering, Linda. 🙂