The Cambridge Jane Austen – serie

A treasure for those newly discovering Jane Austen as much as for those long familiar with her extraordinary oeuvre and its influence, this authoritative and attractive new edition is accessible and informative for readers at all levels. With helpful contextual notes and enlightening prefaces, it presents the reader with the six celebrated published novels alongside the unpublished writings, from Austen's youth to her final years. Released to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth, the set is beautifully presented, including illustrations drawn by Austen's sister Cassandra to accompany her childhood piece 'The History of England', as well as Austen's poems, unfinished novels and a selection of letters in which she offers advice on writing fiction. Taken together, the volumes allow the reader to follow Jane Austen's creative development, observe her craft of fiction and experience her world with more clarity than ever before.

In her earliest writings, a precocious, alarmingly assured Jane Austen views the adult world with wide, clear eyes, cheekily amused at the emotions, pomposity, intrigues and bustle of family and friends. Composed between the ages of eleven and seventeen, they reveal a child's excitement in language and its imaginative possibilities. Most pieces are ebullient and anarchic; many are surreal, displaying gluttony, drunkenness, matricide, theft and excess, combined with total self-absorption. The cheerful characters roar through their transgressions without a shred of shame or responsibility. This edition prints all of Austen's childhood works, from the earliest comic pieces to the later, more psychologically realistic 'Catharine, or the Bower', which anticipates themes in the adult novels. The volume also includes the comical illustrations her sister Cassandra contributed to 'The History of England'. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Northanger Abbey is both an ingenious Gothic parody and a realistic portrait of the social education of a naive young girl in late eighteenth-century England. Conceived in the 1790s but not published until after Jane Austen's death, the novel straddles the style of her childhood writings, with their playful mockery of contemporary fiction, and the later mature works which probe both society and individual psychology. It paints a wonderfully dense picture of the material and social conditions of genteel English life in town and country. Through the young, naïve heroine, the reader experiences the popular delight in escapist and sensational fiction typical of the period. The novel invites us to enjoy being laughed at for our own fictional expectations, while happily fulfilling most of them. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Money and destructive passion overshadow romance in this darkly humorous novel of sexual manoeuvring and greed. Appearing anonymously in 1811 under the attribution 'By A Lady', Sense and Sensibility is Jane Austen's first published work. Uniquely among her novels it has two heroines: stoical Elinor, the sensitive consciousness of the book, representative of 'sense', and flamboyant, self-indulgent Marianne, whose emotional adventures deliver energy and zest, representative of 'sensibility'. The novel is an edgy contrapuntal tale of different personalities and experiences, revealing much about the constraints and difficulties of a woman's life. In addition, the book offers a remarkable window onto the material culture of Austen's time; it includes some memorable bric-a-brac such as an ornamented toothpick case and some fine breakfast china quarrelled over by rich and poor relatives. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of Austen's six remarkable novels. Full of crackling dialogue, it achieves the finest balance of comedy and reflection, liveliness and solemnity. While revealing the restrictive life of genteel women at the turn of the nineteenth century, it provides as the central consciousness  the clever, witty, and flirtatious Elizabeth Bennet, arguably Austen's most alluring heroine. One of the great love stories of English literature, the novel has spawned countless films and fantasies. In its brilliant balance of psychological observation and social comedy, the original effortlessly survives its global exploitation. The novels Austen wrote later in life were more complex but, drafted when the author was close to her heroine's age of twenty, Pride and Prejudice remains her most vivacious and sparkling work. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Many critics regard Mansfield Park as Austen's supreme achievement. It is a serious, even earnest work, but never dull, finding its comedy less in dialogue than in situation. It has wonderful set pieces including an outing to a grand house, aborted theatricals and a visit to a chaotic ménage. All Austen's novels are set during the French Wars, but Mansfield Park catches most clearly the anxious mood of a wartime nation unsure of its moral status. The heroine Fanny Price holds to principles against sophisticated laxness, but she is also self-deceiving as her principles jostle against her nature and youth. With the subtle irony that is her forte, Austen shows that integrity wins out but at a cost - and that virtue is neither easy nor always pleasurable to achieve. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Jane Austen's stylish masterpiece, Emma is a brilliant psychological comedy about the mind's deception of itself. It speaks to the tedium of family and social existence, yet does so in a sparkling, utterly beguiling manner. An 'imaginist' and a snob, the heroine Emma inhabits a comical world of secrecy, illusion and fantasies. Living a claustrophobic life in which she is always significant, Emma persuades herself that marriage is unnecessary for her; instead, she employs her charm and position to manoeuvre others, until she learns the truth about herself and her needs. A sharp portrait of entitlement and snobbery, Emma is simultaneously a story of family kindness and of a nurturing village community more fully realised in this novel than in any other Austen work. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

A powerful portrait of grief triumphantly overcome, Persuasion is Austen's most passionate work: more than any previous novel, it concentrates on the intense inner life of the heroine. It opens with Anne Elliot lamenting lost love in a painful reversal of the courtship novel; it then transforms into a rapturous romantic comedy. Against a dysfunctional gentry family corroded by snobbishness, the novel pits professional self-made naval men marked by energy and domestic virtues: the heroine's future lies with them rather than with the landed class into which she was born. Persuasion is the only Austen novel that ends with the heroine lacking a settled home. Uniquely in Austen's oeuvre, an earlier part of the text survives. This edition includes a transcript, allowing readers to glimpse Austen's creative process. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.