Persuasion narrates the emotional journey of its protagonist Anne Elliot, who chances upon Captain Wentworth, a suitor she was persuaded to reject seven years earlier, and whose reappearance causes her to reflect on her past decisions and contemplate her marital future.
Vividly depicting the society holiday towns of Lyme Regis and Bath and infused with its author''s trademark wit, Austen''s last completed novel, set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, is an entertaining and enduring account of the dilemmas facing young women in the early nineteenth century.>
Sense and Sensibility is the story of the two Dashwood sisters, who embody the conflict between the oppressive nature of "civilized" society and the human desire for romantic passion. Elinor is cautious and unassuming about sentimental matters, while Marianne is wild and passionate, falling hopelessly in love with Mr Willoughby. But the lessons in life and romance see the two characters develop and change, with sense and sensibility needing to be compromised as a matter of survival.
Austen''s first published work, the novel has been read as an autobiographical reflection of her relationship with her own sister Cassandra. Against the backdrop of a fragile social context, Jane Austen creates a romantic masterpiece of raw and intense quality.>
Born into a poor family, Fanny Price is raised amid the daunting splendour of Mansfield Park by her rich uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. Treated as an inferior by most of the family, Fanny forms a close attachment to her cousin Edmund, the only person to show her kindness. With the departure of her uncle to the West Indies and the arrival from London of the fashionable Henry and Mary Crawford, flirtation and romantic intrigue abound.
As Fanny becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of her companions, she finds herself isolated and forced to face the conflict between her sense of integrity and social expectation.>
While enjoying a six weeks'' stay in fashionable Bath, the young and callow Catherine Morland is introduced to the delights of high society. Thanks to a new literary diet of the sensational and the macabre, Catherine travels to Northanger Abbey fully expecting to become embroiled in a Gothic adventure of intrigue and suspense - and, once there, soon begins to form the most gruesome and improbable theories about the exploits of its occupants.
An early work, but published posthumously, Northanger Abbey is a parody of the Gothic genre typified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, as well as a witty comedy of manners in the style of Jane Austen''s later novels and, ultimately, an enchanting love story.>
These inventive and entertaining pieces display the early sparkles of wit and imagination of Jane Austen''s mature fiction. Written when she was only in her teens, they are by turns amusing, acerbic and occasionally downright silly.
''Love and Friendship'' and ''Lesley Castle'' provide parodies of the gentry and the fashionable idea of sensibility of the time. ''A History of England'' supplies us with a lively chronicle of English monarchic history. Also included in this collection are ''The Three Sisters'', ''Catharine'', the series of vignettes known as ''A Collection of Letters'' and ''Lady Susan'', an epistolary story which was recently adapted for the cinema. Taken together, these pieces display all the wry humour, shrewd observation and satirical insight of Emma or Pride and Prejudice.>
