Unlike most Jane Austen scholarship before 1980, much recent scholarship analyzes the novels of Austen, who lived from 1775 to 1817, in the context of Austen's tumultuous times, which saw the French and American revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars. Yet Frantz notes another revolution, rarely mentioned in Austen scholarship: the Great Masculine Renunciation that altered conventions in men's dress and behavior. During the later eighteenth century, wealthy gentlemen exchanged the velvets and satins long in fashion for somber woolen suits. Frantz contends that this change reflected deeper cultural changes. The value once placed on men's expressiveness, reflected in Mackenzie's novel The Man of Feeling (1771), gave way to a preference for emotional restraint. In Austen's novels, the heroine often struggles to glimpse the true nature of hero beneath his reserved exterior.