Classic Literature for Travel Reading Published by Bearleader Chronicle: It would be hard to find another piece of English literature so well-known, so enduring, so well-read, so adapted. Something that strikes such a cord with its readers must have been authored by a highly trained and experienced writer. But it's not true. Jane Austen started writing purely for entertainment, to amuse herself and her family. It was only much later, near the end of her life, that she set about editing her life's work into the six published novels we know and love.Pride and Prejudice, one of my favorite of Austen's writings, was penned in her early twenties, at her family home in Steventon, Hampshire, about halfway between London and Bath - both cities in which Austen lived for a time.Like all Austen's stories, this one is carefully constructed from Austen's keen observations of life in the pastoral English countryside, with all its foibles ambitions and eccentricities. She once wrote, "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on." And as far as she was concerned, her local observations were enough to tell the story of the whole human family.So, let's take a short trip to the English countryside as Jane Austen introduces us to the Bennet family, guiding us through their lives, triumphs and tribulations.

Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen's Textual Lives offers a new way of approaching and reading a very familiar author. One is a history of the transmission and transformation of Jane Austen through manuscripts, critical editions, biographies, and adaptations; a second provides a conspectus of the development of English Studies as a discipline in which the original and primary place of textual criticism is recovered; and a third reviews the role of Oxford University Press in shaping a canon of English texts in the twentieth century. Jane Austen can be discovered in all three. Since her rise to celebrity status at the end of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen has occupied a position within English-speaking culture that is both popular and canonical, accessible and complexly inaccessible, fixed and certain yet wonderfully amenable to shifts of sensibility and cultural assumptions. The implied contradiction was represented in the early twentieth century by, on the one hand, the Austen family's continued management, censorship, and sentimental marketing of the sweet lady novelist of the Hampshire countryside; and on the other, by R. W. Chapman's 1923 Clarendon Press edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, which subjected her texts to the kind of scholarly probing reserved till then for classical Greek and Roman authors obscured by centuries of attrition. It was to be almost fifty years before the Clarendon Press considered it necessary to recalibrate the reputation of another popular English novelist in this way. Beginning with specific encounters with three kinds of textual work and the problems, clues, or challenges to interpretation they continue to present, Kathryn Sutherland goes on to consider the absence of a satisfactory critical theory of biography that can help us address the partial life, and ends with a discussion of the screen adaptations through which the texts continue to live on. Throughout, Jane Austen's textual identities provide a means to explore the wider issue of what text is and to argue the importance of understanding textual space as itself a powerful agent established only by recourse to further interpretations and fictions.

Having seriously believed that she was destined to become a spinster, Elizabeth Bennet finds herself married to one of the most eligible bachelors in Derbyshire. She now faces the daunting task of assuming her place within the vast and prestigious family estate of Pemberley. A few ill-disposed individuals would delight to see her fail so there is little room for error as she learns to lead her new household. Darcy is at her side, of course, but he cannot shelter her entirely as gossiping tongues follow her every move. She must navigate the isolation she feels as a stranger in this new setting and learn how to honour her new responsibilities while the lingering presence of her late mother-in-law, Lady Anne, to whom she is always compared, hangs over her. Thankfully, Elizabeth is resourceful. One day, she will triumph over even her harshest critics and prove herself worthy as mistress of Pemberley.

"Nobody turned my head with compliments. Nobody asked me to dance." An elegant accompaniment to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Jennifer Paynter's The Forgotten Sister plucks the neglected Mary from obscurity and reveals her hopes and fears. Mary Bennet spends much of her time apart from her family, closeted in her room reading or playing her music, studying hard for accomplishments. As her four sisters become absorbed in their own romantic dramas, Mary stands apart, believing herself "not pretty enough" to dance with. She watches while Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley--and Mr. Wickham--waltz into her sisters' lives, judging all three gentlemen quite dispassionately (and as it turns out, accurately). But Mary may not be quite so clear-sighted when she finally falls in love herself. She will first have to overcome her own brand of "pride and prejudice."

Introducing Book Candy Classics. They're fun They're gorgeous They're new! Sink your teeth into your favorite story and discover new ones to swoon over! "You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." This is the beginning of one of the most famous literary proposals of all time and the first in this anthology of the most romantic, poignant and colorful love declarations found in classic and modern literature. From spurned lovers to love letters pleading for a long-forgotten romance, this lovely book will remind you of your favorite literary couples and introduce you to new ones. Sometimes a heroic action is in itself a love declaration, or the story ends with the realization that love was there all along -these excerpts from masterpieces of classic and modern literature are as diverse as they are entertaining. Easily read, they will make you laugh, cry and fall in love all over again. All the passionate love scenes we have adored and reread until the pages of our books curled with time are now collected in this beautiful volume to be perused over and over again. Whether you've fallen in love with Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff, Captain Wentworth, Theodore Lawrence, Gilbert Blythe or Newland Archer, this book is for you.

John Matthews' "Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme" (1795) is a humorous picture of a typical day in the most fashionable resort town of late Georgian England. For the gouty and the infirm, Bath offered health: its mineral waters, whether bathed in or drunk, were thought to relieve a variety of complaints. For everyone else, there was endless entertainment, from the morning visit to the Pump Room to the famous public balls held four evenings a week. Bath was also the city that Jane Austen knew best, lived in longest, and wrote most about. Every one of her novels at least mentions Bath, and large portions of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are set there. Published in 1795, Matthews' poem captures the town just two years before Austen visited it for the first time. The sights and sounds he describes are the very ones that would have greeted a twenty-one-year-old Austen or a seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland.This edition offers an array of critical resources that use "Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme" to deepen readers' appreciation of Austen's life and work. The Biographical Essay explores parallels between the lives of John Matthews and Jane Austen. The Contextual Essay introduces readers to the tradition of the "Bath satire," a popular genre in the late eighteenth century that Austen refined and expanded in her two Bath novels. The notes on the text provide not only historical and cultural information, but images of late Georgian Bath and direct connections between the poem and Austen's novels.

Revisit the world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, through the eyes of the woman who is determined to win Mr. Darcy’s affections, in this sumptuous and romantic novel. To Jane Austen’s faithful readers, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the hearts of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are forever entwined. But if Miss Caroline Bingley has her way, all will transpire very differently. Ever since she met him, Caroline has intended to wed Mr. Darcy. Intelligent and well educated, Caroline is an ambitious rising star in fashionable society―some might say conniving―but in Regency England, what can she do to better her situation but marry well? Surely, Mr. Darcy is aware that Caroline will make the perfect wife and hostess at Pemberley, his grand estate. Now, all she need do is await his proposal. Caroline’s brother, Charles, takes a country estate, Netherfield Park, where he is drawn to Jane Bennet. To Caroline’s initial amusement, Mr. Darcy takes note of Elizabeth Bennet, but humour turns to concern when his interest increases. At the same time, Caroline meets Mr. Tryphon, a young man new to London and introduced to society by Caroline’s friend, Lady Eleanor Amesbury. Try as she may, Caroline finds it well-nigh impossible to maintain her decorum in his company. Despite her growing feelings for Mr. Tryphon’s dark eyes, and the touch of his firm forearm beneath her gloved fingers, Caroline knows that her future life is entwined with that of Mr. Darcy. And nothing―not love, passion, friendship, or loyalty―shall stand in the way of Caroline’s aspirations in Miss Bingley Requests, Judy McCrosky’s richly romantic reimagining of Pride and Prejudice.

A lady's reputation is a fragile thing. If anyone discovered Miss Elizabeth Bennet had received a letter from a single gentleman, she could be ruined? or forced to marry a man she detests. In this all-new Pride & Prejudice variation, Elizabeth takes the safe course and refuses to read Mr. Darcy's letter of explanation. Returning home unaware of Wickham's true nature, Elizabeth confesses everything to him, putting both Mr. Darcy and herself in grave danger from Wickham's schemes.

"Discover how Charles and Jane really felt and what happened to Jane in London"--Cover.