"Faces in the crowd: as Napoleon roamed, the home ..." Topic

…front was feverish.

""Jane Austen never heard the cannon roar at Waterloo," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1940. Nor did Walter Scott see "sailors drowning at Trafalgar". Austen had two brothers in the Royal Navy and lived, said Woolf, "very close to the life of [her] time" but in neither her novels nor those of Scott can be found a direct mention of the Napoleonic wars.

When Woolf was writing in her Sussex cottage about Austen as "not disturbed or agitated or changed by war", she was able to hear the gunfire from the Channel. She could turn on the wireless and listen to "an airman telling us how this very afternoon he shot down a raider; his machine caught fire; he plunged into the sea; the light turned green and then black; he rose to the top and was rescued by a trawler". Austen, Woolf reminds us, had never heard the disembodied voice of Napoleon enter her drawing room in the way that "We hear Hitler's voice as we sit at home in the evening."…"
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