This volume of verse by Jane Austen and her family contains all the known poems by Jane herself and a selection of work by her sister Cassandra, four of her brothers, her uncle James, her nieces Anna and Fanny, and her nephew James Edward.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

These three short works show Austen experimenting with a variety of different literary styles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of social classes and settings. The early epistolary novel "Lady Susan" depicts an unscrupulous coquette, toying with the affections of several men. In contrast, "The Watsons" is a delightful fragment, whose spirited heroine - Emma - finds her marriage opportunities limited by poverty and pride. Meanwhile "Sanditon", set in a seaside resort, offers a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and spectators, treated by Austen with both amusement and scepticism.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st / Jane Austen
• Excerpt from A child's history of England / Charles Dickens.

"History of England..." is an (20 p.) historical satire produced by 16-year-old Jane Austen. It is a spoof on the history of the British monarchy from 1399 to 1649. What you find are brief, opinionated pieces, ranging from two sentences on Edward V who "lived so little a while that nobody had time to draw his picture" to 19 sentences on Elizabeth, of whom "It was the peculiar misfortune . . . to have had bad ministers --since wicked as she herself was, she could not have committed such extensive mischief, had not these vile & abandoned men connived at, and encouraged her in her crimes. Charles Dicken's "A child's history of England" was originally intended as a study-piece for his children. With it's flamboyant narrative it served as an unconventional counter text to the more straitlaced historical canon of his times.

• v. 1. Sense and sensibility
• v. 2. Pride and prejudice (3rd ed., Repr. with revisions, 1965)
• v. 3. Mansfield Park
• v. 4. Emma
• v. 5. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (3rd ed., Repr. with revisions, 1969) --
• v. 6. Minor works (1st ed., Repr. with further revisions by B. C. Southam, 1969).

• Chronology-- Introduction-- Note on the text-- The Fiction: Lady Susan-- The Watsons-- Sanditon-- Poems and Charades: Poems-- Charades-- Austen on Fiction: To Mrs. Hunter of Norwich-- Letters on Fiction-- Plan of a Novel-- Opinions of Mansfield Park-- Opinions of Emma-- Appendices: A. Transcription of The Watsons-- B. Transcription of Sanditon-- C. Sir Charles Grandison-- D. Prayers-- E. Family poems-- F. Attributed poems-- Corrections and emendations-- Explanatory notes.
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The manuscripts that survive from Jane Austen's maturity offer a unique insight into her life as a creative writer. This volume collects together all the literary manuscripts from Austen's adult years (with the exception of the cancelled chapters of Persuasion, in this edition printed with the finished novel), together with letters discussing the art of fiction, and her record of responses to her novels. Included here are the novella Lady Susan, the novel fragments of The Watsons and Sanditon, poems and charades, and the comic 'Plan of a Novel'. In an appendix are collected other works ascribed to Austen, including the play Sir Charles Grandison and three prayers. The introduction offers a history of the manuscripts and a full account of the current state of scholarship on them, and the texts are accompanied by explanatory notes and contextual information.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction-- Note on the text-- Volume the First: Frederic and Elfrida-- Jack and Alice-- Edgar and Emma-- Henry and Eliza-- The adventures of Mr Harley-- Sir William Mountague-- Memoirs of Mr Clifford-- The beautiful Cassandra-- Amelia Webster-- The Visit-- The Mystery-- The Three Sisters-- A fragment - written to inculcate the practise of Virtue-- A beautiful description of the different effects of Sensibility on different Minds-- The Generous Curate-- Ode to Pity-- Volume the Second: Love and Freindship-- Lesley Castle-- The History of England-- A Collection of Letters-- The female philosopher-- The First Act of a Comedy-- A Letter from a Young Lady-- A Tour through Wales-- A Tale-- Volume the Third: Evelyn, Catharine, or the Bower-- Corrections and Emendations-- Appendix A: The History of England: Facsimile-- Appendix B: Marginalia in Oliver Goldsmith's The History of England-- Appendix C: Marginalia in Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts-- Appendix D: Sophia Sentiment's Letter in The Loiterer-- Appendix D: Continuations of 'Evelyn' and 'Catharine' by James Edward Austen and Anna Lefroy-- Abbreviations-- Explanatory notes.
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Jane Austen's remarkable juvenilia date from 1787, when she was eleven, to 1793, when she was seventeen. She preserved these early writings in three manuscript notebooks, entitled, with mock solemnity, 'Volume the First', 'Volume the Second', and 'Volume the Third'. Most of these works are short fictions, but Austen also wrote the opening of what could have become a full-length novel, 'Catharine', as well as dramatic sketches, verses, and a few non-fictional pieces. Astonishingly sophisticated and inventive, these writings are now receiving the scholarly attention they deserve. This edition provides a fresh transcription of Austen's manuscripts, with comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction, covering the context and publication history of the juvenilia, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual apparatus. It also prints, for the first time, the copious satirical marginalia that Austen wrote on her copies of Oliver Goldsmith's History of England.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• General Editor's preface-- Acknowledgments-- Chronology-- Introduction-- Note on the text-- Northanger Abbey-- Appendix: Summaries and Extracts from Ann Radcliffe's novels-- Corrections and emendations to
• 1818 text-- List of abbreviations-- Explanatory notes.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

One of the first of Jane Austen's novels to be written, and one of the last to be published, Northanger Abbey is both an amusing story of how a naive girl enters society and wins the affection of a witty young clergyman, and a high-spirited parody of the lurid Gothic novels that were popular during Austen's youth. In the process it features a vivid account of social life in late eighteenth-century Bath, and Austen's famous defence of the novel as a literary form. This edition, based on the text of the novel as published posthumously in 1818, is accompanied by explanatory notes, and an appendix summarising the plots and situations of the Gothic fictions that form the basis of much of Austen's comedy. In addition there is an extensive critical introduction covering the context, publication, and critical history of the novel, a chronology of Austen's life, and authoritative textual apparatus.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• General Editor's preface-- Acknowledgments-- Chronology-- Introduction-- Note on the text-- Persuasion-- Appendices-- Emendations-- Abbreviations-- Explanatory notes.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The accident of death makes Persuasion Jane Austen's final novel. It deserves its position by its innovative treatment of passion and rhetorical style and its development of those themes of memory and time, public and private history, inner and outer lives, language and literature, emotion and restraint that have marked all Austen's work. Where the other works move towards a new symbolic and physical home for the heroine, Persuasion begins with her ejection and ends with her understanding that home is not a place at all but an ambiance and an acceptance of change. The volume provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual apparatus. This edition is an indispensable resource for all scholars and readers of Austen.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• General Editor's preface-- Acknowledgments-- Chronology-- Introduction-- Note on the text-- Pride and Prejudice-- Appendices-- Emendations-- Abbreviations-- Explanatory notes.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.' With this famous declaration Jane Austen launches into the story of the five Bennet sisters. It is a story that on first reading is full of suspense, surprise and, ultimately, satisfaction, and which on re-reading commands, in addition, admiration for the author's supreme skill in managing a deceptively complex plot to its triumphant conclusion. First published in 1813, and Austen's most popular novel in her own lifetime, Pride and Prejudice has since been widely recognised as one of the finest novels in the English language. The volume provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual apparatus. This edition is an indispensable resource for all scholars and readers of Austen.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• General Editor's preface-- Acknowledgments-- Chronology-- Introduction-- Note on the text-- Emma-- Corrections and emendations-- Abbreviations-- Explanatory notes.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Emma is Austen's most technically accomplished novel, with a hidden plot, the full implications of which are only revealed by a second reading. It is here presented for the first time with a full scholarly apparatus. The text retains the spelling and the punctuation of the first edition of 1816, allowing readers to see the novel as Austen's contemporaries first encountered it. The volume provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual apparatus.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• General Editor's preface-- Acknowledgments-- Chronology-- Introduction-- Note on the text-- Mansfield Park-- Introductory Note on Lovers' Vows-- Lovers' Vows by Elizabeth Inchbald-- Corrections and emendations-- Appendix. commentary on the text-- Abbreviations-- Explanatory notes.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In recent years, Mansfield Park has come to be regarded as Austen's most controversial novel. It was published in two editions in her lifetime and here the 1814 and 1816 texts are fully collated for the first time. All the variants are included on the page, allowing readers to see the differences between the first edition and the second, which include some important amendments made by Jane Austen herself. Also included, with a brief note on Elizabeth Inchbald, is the text of Lovers' Vows, the play around which much of the plot of Mansfield Park revolves. The volume provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual apparatus.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

One of Jane Austen's most charming youthful "novels"-in-miniature--presented in a deluxe illustrated edition that will delight all Austen fans Most people think Jane Austen wrote only six novels. Fortunately for us, she wrote several others, though very short ones, while still a young girl. Austen was only twelve or thirteen when she wrote The Beautifull Cassandra, an irreverent and humorous little masterpiece. Weighing in at 465 occasionally misspelled words, it is a complete and perfect novel-in-miniature, made up of a dedication to her older sister Cassandra and twelve chapters, each consisting of a sentence or two. Narrating the slightly criminal adventures of the sixteen-year-old title character, The Beautifull Cassandra gives us Austen's most irrepressible heroine, who, after stealing a hat, leaves her mother's shop to flounce around London, eating ice cream (without paying), taking coach rides (without paying), and encountering handsome young ladies and gentlemen (without speaking)--all to return home hours later with whispered joy: "This is a day well spent." This charming edition features elegant and edgy watercolor drawings by Leon Steinmetz and is edited by leading Austen scholar Claudia L. Johnson. In her illuminating afterword, Johnson calls The Beautifull Cassandra "among the most brilliant and polished" of Austen's youthful writings--a precocious work written for the amusement of her family but already anticipating her mature irony, sense of the absurd, gift for parody, and, above all, stylistic mastery. The result is a marvelous edition of a literary treasure that is sure to delight.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• VOLUME 1-- VOLUME 2-- VOLUME 3-- VOLUME 4-- VOLUME 5.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Kathryn Sutherland presents an edition of the fiction manuscripts of Jane Austen (1775-1817) in this five-volume set. Scholars have pored over this much-loved novelist for decades, yet there are still more riches to be uncovered by the careful presentation of the texts in this fully annotated new edition. Jane Austen's fiction manuscripts are the first substantial collection of autograph writings to survive for a British novelist. They represent every stage of her writing life, from childhood-aged 11 or 12-to the year of her death. The manuscripts represent a wide variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and handwritten publications for private circulation. Where the juvenile, handwritten notebooks have long appeared to scholars to be finished artefacts, most of the other manuscript writings consist of pre-print or working drafts in various stages of development. There is no evidence to indicate that Austen saw the bulk of these working drafts as anything other than provisional. Hence the stark situation that no manuscripts remain for works which saw publication in her lifetime, the assumption being that these were routinely destroyed once replaced by print forms. There is only one exception: the two cancelled chapters of Persuasion, which represent an alternative ending to the one that made it into print. The manuscript evidence therefore represents a different Jane Austen: different in the range of fiction they contain from the novels we know only from print; and different in what they reveal about the workings of her imagination. Because of the variety of their pre-print states, because of their experimental range, and because of the way they extend the time span of her writing life (far longer than the single decade of the printed novels), these manuscript writings can claim a special place in our understanding of the evolution of the famous fictions. The edition presents full transcriptions of the texts based on a fresh examination of all the extant witnesses in Austen's hand, with facing facsimile images of the manuscript pages, and commentary on revisions, over-writings, erasures, and other features of the manuscripts.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"An annotated edition of Jane Austen's famous novel, with notes and illustrations on pages facing the novel text. Includes an introduction, chronology, bibliography, and maps"-- Provided by publisher.