Jane Austen

For the first time, all three volumes of Jane Austen's brilliant early manuscripts are available in in beautiful facsimile editions. Forever immortalized as the author of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen actually produced her first "books" as a teenager. Taking their names from the inscriptions on their covers--Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third--these brilliant little collections include the stories, playlets, verses, and moral fragments she wrote likely from the ages of twelve to eighteen. As a young author, Jane Austen delighted in language, employing it with great humor and surprising skill. She was adept at parodying the popular stories of her day and entertained her readers with outrageous plot lines and characters. Kathryn Sutherland, in her introductions, places Austen's earliest works in context and explains how she mimicked even the style and manner in which this contemporary popular fiction was presented and arranged on the page. None of her six famous novels survives in complete manuscript form. This is a unique opportunity to own likenesses of Jane Austen's notebooks as originally written--in her own hand. The In Her Own Hand series boxed set contains facsimile editions of Jane Austen's fiction, in her handwriting. The books include transcriptions by R. W. Chapman first recorded in 1953. In Her Own Hand boxed set of all three volumes includes: Volume the First Volume the Second Volume the Third

Jane Austen's Emma (1816) tells the story of the coming of age of Emma Woodhouse, "handsome, clever, and rich," who "had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." Typical for the novel's time, Emma's transition to womanhood is accomplished through courtship-both of those around her and, ultimately, her own. As in other Austen works, education and courtship go hand in hand, and Emma's process of learning to relinquish the power of having her own way is also a process of falling in love. However, in Emma this classic plot is both complicated by and reflective of a collection of contemporary issues, assumptions, and anxieties that highlight just how "political" even the most conventional of courtship plots can be. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and an extensive collection of historical documents relating to the composition and reception of the novel, the social implications of England's shift from a rural agrarian to an urban industrial economy, the role of women in provincial society, and the contemporary preoccupation with health and the treatment of illness.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. . . .

These are notebooks from Jane Austen's childhood, and despite their rough nature, they offer something of value: not just the insight they give us into Austen's thinking and her mind, but there is a certain charm here, a thing to value in its own. . . .

Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did, nor could the valet of any new made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion. His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to anything deserved by his own. . . .

These are notebooks from Jane Austen's childhood, and despite their rough nature, they offer something of value: not just the insight they give us into Austen's thinking and her mind, but there is a certain charm here, a thing to value in its own. . . .

My Dear Brother, -- I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation when we last parted of spending some weeks with you at Churchhill, and, therefore, if quite convenient to you and Mrs. Vernon to receive me at present, I shall hope within a few days to be introduced to a sister whom I have so long desired to be acquainted with. My kind friends here are most affectionately urgent with me to prolong my stay, but their hospitable and cheerful dispositions lead them too much into society for my present situation and state of mind; and I impatiently look forward to the hour when I shall be admitted into Your delightful retirement. I long to be made known to your dear little children, in whose hearts I shall be very eager to secure an interest. I shall soon have need for all my fortitude, as I am on the point of separation from my own daughter. . . .