English lit scholar Glenda Hudson examines Jane Austen's presentation of sibling love and rivalry in the context of the dramatic social and historical changes in the late 18th century--and also analyzes the incest motif in numerous works of the period.

The Watsons is an abandoned novel by Jane Austen, completed by her niece. The story tells about the widowed priest and his six children, four of which are daughters wishing to get married t a rich man. Although one of the daughters, Emma, was raised by their rich childless aunt. As a result, she is better educated than her other three sisters and has different values. The pursuit for love and wealthy admirers and the opposition between sisters lead to mingled affairs, romantic love stories, and exciting adventures.

In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded indicates how much ideas about kinship, marriage, and incest have changed. In Family Likeness, Mary Jean Corbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of "family" and even helped refine those borders. Corbett takes up historically contingent and culturally variable notions of who is and is not a relative and whom one can and cannot marry. Her argument is informed by legal and political debates; texts in sociology and anthropology; and discussions on the biology of heredity, breeding, and eugenics. In Corbett's view, marriage within families—between cousins, in-laws, or adoptees—offered Victorian women, both real and fictional, an attractive alternative to romance with a stranger, not least because it allowed them to maintain and strengthen relations with other women within the family.

How the works of Jane Austen show that game theory is present in all human behavior Game theory—the study of how people make choices while interacting with others—is one of the most popular technical approaches in social science today. But as Michael Chwe reveals in his insightful new book, Jane Austen explored game theory's core ideas in her six novels roughly two hundred years ago—over a century before its mathematical development during the Cold War. Jane Austen, Game Theorist shows how this beloved writer theorized choice and preferences, prized strategic thinking, and analyzed why superiors are often strategically clueless about inferiors. Exploring a diverse range of literature and folktales, this book illustrates the wide relevance of game theory and how, fundamentally, we are all strategic thinkers.

This book helps to bridge the gap between science and literary scholarship. Building on findings in the evolutionary human sciences, the authors construct a model of human nature in order to illuminate the evolved psychology that shapes the organization of characters in nineteenth-century British novels, from Jane Austen to E. M. Forster.

She argues that the historical realignment of the categories of class, kinship, and representation that took place with the shift from patriarchal to egalitarian models of familial order marked a transformative moment in the cultural construction of incest.

In a pitch-perfect literary parody, Eckstut and Auburn claim to have stumbled upon lost manuscript pages from Jane Austen's novels, along with shocking letters to her sister and publisher. The "excerpts" take readers behind closed doors to behold some very naughty goings-on among the characters of "Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma", and all of Austen's novels.

When Jane Austen dies at the age of just 41, Anne, governess to her brother, Edward Austen, is devastated and begins to suspect that someone might have wanted her out of the way. Now, 20 years on, she hopes that medical science might have progressed sufficiently to assess the one piece of evidence she has - a tainted lock of Jane's hair. Natural causes or murder? Even 20 years down the line, Anne is determined to get to the bottom of the mysterious death of the acclaimed Miss Austen.

This volume explores the multiple connections between the two most canonical authors in English, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. The collection reflects on the historical, literary, critical and filmic links between the authors and their fates. Considering the implications of the popular cult of Austen and Shakespeare, the essays are interdisciplinary and comparative: ranging from Austen’s and Shakespeare’s biographies to their presence in the modern vampire saga Twilight, passing by Shakespearean echoes in Austen’s novels and the authors’ afterlives on the improv stage, in wartime cinema, modern biopics and crime fiction. The volume concludes with an account of the Exhibition “Will & Jane” at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which literally brought the two authors together in the autumn of 2016. Collectively, the essays mark and celebrate what we have called the long-standing “love affair” between William Shakespeare and Jane Austen—over 200 years and counting.

"A dedicated Anglophile and Janeite, Elizabeth Parker is hoping the trip to the Jane Austen Festival in Bath will distract her from her lack of a job and her uncertain future with her boyfriend. On the plane ride, she and Aunt Winnie meet Professor Zackary Baines, a self-proclaimed expert on all things Austen. He claims that within each Austen novel there is another darker secondary story, usually involving sordid behavior. He claims to know the true cause of Austen's death, and it's a truth which will greatly outrage Austen fans. Elizabeth and Aunt Winnie don't take him or his findings seriously. But someone must, because during the costume ball, Baines is stabbed to death. Kiely expertly combines the wit and spunk of Austen's protagonists with a contemporary traditional mystery, creating an entertaining puzzle. Austen fans especially are in for a big treat"--