Empire

Abstract

Before the advent of postcolonial literary criticism, which is usually dated from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), most studies of nineteenth-century British fiction had little to say about the colonies or the Empire.¹ That was largely because, from Jane Austen through George Gissing, most novelists focused on domestic settings and characters. Austen wrote during and shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, which ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Nevertheless, though soldiers and sailors appear in her novels, they are ordinarily minor characters, and while some of them have served, like Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility (1811), in India or elsewhere, none of the scenes in her novels takes place abroad. So, too, in New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893), Gissing has very little to say about places and events beyond Britain, and that is true as well of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels and of most of Elizabeth Gaskell’s and George Eliot’s fiction.