Jane Austen has proved to be one of the most accessible and enduring legacies of Western culture in the last 200 years. As a cultural icon, as well as an object of serious intellectual investigation, Jane Austen has influenced the critical understanding of and the popular imagination around social relations and cultural rituals - the institution of marriage, the ideology of romantic relationship, the cultural imagining of class, or social prestige - as well as larger historical pictures that include slavery and colonialism.

This cutting-edge volume bridges two significant bodies of recent Austen scholarship, one emphasising the issue of gender and one centralising the history of colonialism and slavery.