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Did Willoughby join the navy? Patrick O'Brian's thirty-year homage to Jane Austen.(Miscellany)(Critical Essay)

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From: Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal
Date: 20040101
Author:Simmons, James R., Jr.

PERHAPS NO AUTHOR during the last two centuries has been compared to Jane Austen as frequently, and as favorably, as the acknowledged master of the late twentieth-century maritime-adventure novel, Patrick O'Brian. The twenty novels and the fragment of a twenty-first in O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin saga, informally known as the Master and Commander series, bear a striking resemblance to Austen's work. Both Austen's and O'Brian's novels largely take place during the Regency and the years preceding it, but Austen was writing about her own times, whereas O'Brian, who died ...

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