The Complete Works of Jane Austen / GENERAL PRESS (ePub)

The Complete Novels of Jane Austen brings together the indelible characters, picturesque locations, and masterful storytelling of Jane Austen, one of the most beloved and celebrated authors of all time. This special ebook edition includes all of Austen's published works: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Love and Friendship and Other Early Works, Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. These novel contain some of the most brilliant, dazzling prose in the English language.

In a publishing career that spanned less than a decade, Jane Austen used the romantic endeavours of her well-plotted characters as a stage from which to address issues of gender politics and class-consciousness rarely expressed in her day.

Through her vivacious and spirited heroines and their circle, she painted vivid portraits of English middle-class life as the eighteenth century came to a close. Each of these novels is a love story and a story about marriage-marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not mere romances. Ironic, comic, and wise, they are masterly studies of the society Austen observed.

This collection features the following works:

Emma

Lady Susan

Love and Friendship and Other Early Works

Mansfield Park

Northanger Abbey

Persuasion

Pride and Prejudice

Sense and Sensibility

JANE AUSTEN:

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.

Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about 35 years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of 'Sense and Sensibility' (1811), 'Pride and Prejudice' (1813), 'Mansfield Park' (1814) and 'Emma' (1815), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, 'Northanger Abbey' and 'Persuasion', both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled 'Sanditon', but died before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's 'A Memoir of Jane Austen' introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.