Jane Austen

Esta novela epistolar, escrita probablemente en 1794, narra los planes de la protagonista, la recientemente viuda lady Susan, para encontrar un nuevo marido, a la vez que intenta casar a su hija de diecis is a os. Austen se sirve de este g nero para construir una obra en donde las distintas cartas se engarzan como piezas de un rompecabezas hasta completar ante los ojos del lector una historia de peque as intrigas. La obra subvierte todas las normas de la novela rom ntica: lady Susan tiene un papel activo; no s lo es hermosa, sino tambi n inteligente e ingeniosa, y sus pretendientes son significativamente m s j venes que ella.

Jane Austen's brilliant, hilarious - and often outrageous - early stories, sketches and pieces of nonsense, in a beautiful Penguin Classics clothbound edition. Jane Austen's earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven years, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work: wit, acute insight into human folly, and a preoccupation with manners, morals and money. But they are also a product of the eighteenth century she grew up in - dark, grotesque, often surprisingly bawdy, and a far cry from the polished, sparkling novels of manners for which she became famous. Drunken heroines, babies who bite off their mother's fingers, and a letter-writer who has murdered her whole family all feature in these very funny pieces. This edition includes all of Austen's juvenilia, including her 'History of England' - written by 'a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian' - and the novella 'Lady Susan', in which the anti-heroine schemes and cheats her way through high society. Taken together, they offer a fascinating - and often surprising - insight into the early Austen. This major new edition is the first time Austen's juvenilia has appeared in Penguin Classics. Edited by Christine Alexander, it includes an introduction, notes and other useful editorial materials. Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. In her youth she wrote many burlesques, parodies and other stories, including a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan. On her father's retirement in 1801, the family moved to Bath, and subsequently to Chawton in Hampshire. The novels published in Austen's lifetime include Sense and Sensibility(1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815-16, and was published, together with Northanger Abbey, posthumously in 1818. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817. Christine Alexander is Scientia Professor of English at the University of New South Wales and general editor of the Juvenilia Press. She has published extensively on the Brontës and has co-edited the first book on literary juvenilia, The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (2005).'Spirited, easy, full of fun, verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense... At fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself' - Virginia Woolf'[Her] inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter' - G. K. Chesterton

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London. Though the story is set at the turn of the 19th century, it retains a fascination for modern readers, continuing near the top of lists of "most loved books." It has become one of the most popular novels in English literature and receives considerable attention from literary scholars. Modern interest in the book has resulted in a number of dramatic adaptations and an abundance of novels and stories imitating Austen's memorable characters or themes. To date, the book has sold some 20 million copies worldwide. Reception The novel was well received, with three favourable reviews in the first months following publication. Anne Isabella Milbanke, later to be the wife of Lord Byron, called it "the fashionable novel." Noted critic and reviewer George Henry Lewes declared that he "would rather have written Pride and Prejudice, or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley Novels." Charlotte Bront

Jane Austen's classic novel begins: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." And so the Bennet daughters-Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia-are set in motion when Mr. Bingley lets Netherfield Park, bringing Mr. Darcy to their neighborhood. Jane Austen's masterpiece of country life in Regency England sparkles with humor and irony.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) 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 have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Sense and Sensibility (1811) is her first published novel and, after Pride and Prejudice, her most famous. It contrasts the attitudes of two sisters, practical Elinor and romantic Marianne Dashwood (representing "sense" and "sensibility," respectively), as they strive to achieve the single most important accomplishment for an English girl in the Regency era: find a suitable (and sufficently affluent) husband. This edition is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for English developed by the Regents of the University of Deseret in the mid-nineteenth century.