With dazzling wit and keen insight, Jane Austen chronicles the subtleties and nuances of--and the aspirations and machinations at work in--her own social milieu. Through the stories of her spirited heroines and their circles, their interactions and rituals, their movements from ballrooms to drawing rooms, from London and Bath to parkland and gardens, she recreates the English gentry life that she observed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Each of her novels is a love story and a story about marriage--marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not romances; ironic, comic, wise, and penetrating, they are brilliant portrayals of the society Jane Austen knew.
Enhanced by a fond and lively introduction by bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club), this treasure trove of seven novels is a must for every Austen fan.
Editorial Review(s)
"Another neat-and large-volume in Penguin's revamped "Deluxe Classics Editions" is this bruiser corralling Austen's seven novels for a respectable price. Along with the complete texts of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Lady Susan, this also features an introduction by Austen scholar Karen Joy Fowler, a list of suggested reading, and notes on the text."
About the Author
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775 at Steventon near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. She lived with her family at Steventon until they moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. After his death in 1805, she moved around with her mother; in 1809, they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. Here she remained, except for a few visits to London, until in May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. There she died on July 18, 1817.
As a girl Jane Austen wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. Her works were only published after much revision, four novels being published in her lifetime. These are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1818 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815-16. She also left two earlier compositions, a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.
