] Do you think JA did not write about people starving to death etc, because, at the end of the day, its just not romantic. JA's novels are romantic escapism. The social commentary within them is limited to the narrow confines of the class they are about. This is not a whiff of *real* scandal or anything that the contemporary reader would find really shocking.

] True or false?

Since you asked, partly true and partly false. While I agree that she confines her social commentary to a small group, and that she never dwells much on guilt and misery, I take issue with the notion that JA's novels are romantic escapism.

Given the nature of the reading public at her time, perhaps the majority of her contemporary readers would have been in pretty much the class she describes. The sorts of comments she got from them often praise her accuracy and realism, as opposed to the wild adventures of the sort she parodies in Northanger Abbey.