Reddit mentions of The Annotated Pride and Prejudice

Absolutely! This one by David Shapard is my favorite. Side-by-side reading, currency conversions, sketches, and of course the cultural notes. He also has done Sense & Sensibility and Emma, which are also very good.

A writer by the name of David M. Shapard has annotated Pride and Predudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. (as usual no love for Mansfield Park )


The books were released by Random House, you should be able to find them at most bookstores. He even annotated the covers!


Link


The books are literally twice the old length because of all the annotations, I love them.

For daily life in the middle ages, Ian Mortimer's The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England and Frances Gies' Life in a Medieval City. If you're up for something denser, Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror presents the 14th century through the story of a French nobleman, Enguerrand de Coucy.

In fiction, you can also learn a lot by picking up well-annotated versions of the classics. e.g. The Annotated Pride and Prejudice has a lot of detail about what exactly an entail is, social mores of the times, maps, and others. Georgette Heyer's An Infamous Army is a painstakingly-researched historical romance that includes a detailed description of the Battle of Waterloo. I've heard that all of Wellington's lines in the book are lifted from primary source accounts of the time.