Jane Austen and the Navy, based upon family papers and naval records, shows the novelist as a historian of Nelson's Navy - not the Navy of great victories at sea but the Navy at home, and of sailors amongst their families and friends - but it is set against the background of war, with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, fought across the globe between 1793 and 1815. Brian Southam, formerly a university lecturer and publisher, is now Chairman on the Jane Austen Society. He ahs published widely on Jane Austen's life and works.