In a publishing career that spanned less than a decade, Jane Austen revolutionised the literary romance, using it as a stage from which to address issues of gender politics and class-consciousness rarely expressed in her day. The novels included in this beautiful leatherbound collection -- Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Lady Susan -- represent all of Austen's mature work as a novelist, and provide the reader with an introduction to the world she and her memorable characters inhabited.

The good old Count Renaud is dead, and his will makes the degenerate Rhodophil his heir, disinheriting his other son Ferdinand, who has married against his father's wishes. Rhodophil promises to share his new riches with his younger brother and his wife Claudina, but Ferdinand hears a mysterious voice from beyond the grave, warning him to flee his brother and his wife to save himself from sin and death! Ferdinand obeys the supernatural warning and sets out to find fortune and adventure. In the course of his quest he will encounter a recluse in a ruined castle with a horrible secret, find himself captured and imprisoned by the Turkish army, and encounter one of Gothic literature's most depraved female characters, the monstrous Fatima. And if he survives all these dangers, Ferdinand must return to Renaud Castle to solve the mystery of the ghostly voice and uncover the terrible truth about his wife and his brother! This edition includes the unabridged text of the four volume 1796 edition, with a new introduction and notes by Karen Morton, and reproductions of illustrations from the 1796 and 1824 editions.

Until the appearance in 1870 of the Memoir written by her nephew J.E. Austen Leigh, very little was known about Jane Austen beyond what could be deduced from her major novels. This had been the family’s choice. Despite this lack of information Deidre Le Faye records that following the acceptance of Jane’s novel Susan for publication in 1803, “according to family tradition, she had composed the plot of another full-length novel”. This, Two Girls of Eighteen, never previously identified as Jane’s, was published in 1806 but at some point apparently suppressed. Only two copies are known to exist - one in the Deutsch Nationalbibliothek and the one from which the present text has been transcribed, which came from a house that Jane knew and is mentioned by her in A Collection of Letters. Two Girls of Eighteen has a divided structure, involving two sisters, Charlotte and Julia, each of whom is given her own story, the one a Romance partly based on Richardson’s Clarissa, the other a Gothic confection - both set in contemporary England. Jane appears to be testing in this the capabilities of such forms for expressing what she was trying to achieve. Through the character of Charlotte, who is attempting to write a novel, she deliberates at length the sort of thing that she herself might write. Her reflections on such subjects as medicine, law, the rights of women, etc take us below the glossy surface of the major novels and show us the complex web of thought that lies beneath.

Recreating Jane Austen is a book for readers who know and love Austen s work. Stimulated by the recent crop of film and television versions of Austen s novels, John Wiltshire examines how they have been transposed and recreated in another age and medium. Wiltshire illuminates the process of recreation through the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and offers Jane Austen s own relation to Shakespeare as a suggestive parallel. Exploring the romantic impulse in Austenian biography, Jane Austen as a commodity, and offering a re-interpretation of Pride and Prejudice, this book approaches the central question of the role Jane Austen plays in the contemporary cultural imagination.

Jane Austen's creative process has been largely unexamined. This book explores her development as a writer: what she adapted from tradition for her needs; what she learned novel to novel; how she used that learning in future works; and how her ultimate mastery of fiction changed the course of English literature. Jane Austen overcame the limitations of early fiction by pivoting from superficial adventures to the psychological studies that have defined the novel since. Her creativity and technique grew as she wrestled with pragmatic writing issues. This evaluation of Austen's creative process brings into focus the strengths and weaknesses of her six novels. Each is examined in its use of major fictional techniques--description, scene-building, point of view, and psychological development--to reveal unique literary attributes. The result is a revealing analysis of how world-class fiction is built from the ground up.

Whether you're a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.