Series: The Cambridge Jane Austen

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...

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...

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,...

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...