Article on Bosworth battlefield quotes Jane Austen’s “A History of England”
The Guardian has an article on an archaeological quest to find Bosworth battlefield, where Richard III met his doom. The article includes a snippet of Jane Austen’s delightfully unscholarly A History of England.
In 1791 the 16-year-old Jane Austen began her mocking account: “NB. There will be very few Dates in this History,” adding “Henry Tudor E. of Richmond as great a villain as ever lived, made a great fuss about getting the Crown and having killed the King at the battle of Bosworth, he succeeded to it.”
A partial and unprejudiced historian, indeed!
The History is also mentioned in an article in the Sun (U.K.) about Yahoo! U.K.’s user-selected website of the year. The British Library’s Turning the Pages site allows users to virtually turn the pages of the manuscript, illustrated by Cassandra Austen.
