In her youth she wrote many burlesques, parodies and other stories, including a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan. Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. Edited by Christine Alexander, it includes an introduction, notes and other useful editorial materials. This major new edition is the first time Austen's juvenilia has appeared in Penguin Classics. Taken together, they offer a fascinating - and often surprising - insight into the early Austen. 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. 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.
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. 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. Jane Austen's brilliant, hilarious - and often outrageous - early stories, sketches and pieces of nonsense, in a beautiful Penguin Classics clothbound edition. GET BOOK Love and Freindship by Jane Austen Summary As Emma's cupid-like curiosity about her neighbours, both young and old, moves her to uncover their deeper motives, she is forced to confront a few surprising truths about her own. Little does she know she is not the only person encouraging romantic pairings in the village. With her educated eye for the coordination of pattern and colour, Emma thinks she can now judge what person would best be paired with another, and sets about matchmaking her young friend, Harriet, with various possible suitors. While Isabella grows into a young woman, marries a society photographer for Vogue at the age of 19 and gets down to the business of reproducing herself, Emma pursues a degree in interior design at university in Bath, and then returns to set up shop in her home village. He lives the life of a country gentleman in contemporary England, protectively raising his young daughters, Isabella and Emma. Emma Woodhouse's widowed father is an anxious man, obsessed with nutrition and the latest vitamins. GET BOOK Emma: A Modern Retelling by Alexander McCall Smith SummaryĪn unstoppable combination: Alexander McCall Smith and Jane Austen, as Sandy modernizes the story of Emma Woodhouse. Through their parallel experience of love - and its threatened loss - the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo.
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. GET BOOK Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen Summary But when chance brings Wentworth and Anne together again eight years later, he is now an accomplished naval captain with an impressive fortune, and Anne must face her feelings for him that remain and consider how different her life could have been if only she hadn’t been so easily persuaded by others. Anne’s well-meaning family and friends convinced her that a young heiress like herself could do better, so she broke off the engagement. When Anne was nineteen, she was in love with and engaged to Frederick Wentworth, a man with no money and few prospects. Jane Austen’s last completed novel, a brilliantly insightful story of regret, second chances, and the courage to follow our hearts Anne Elliot is twenty-seven and unmarried-by all accounts a spinster in her time-seemingly doomed to spend the rest of her life waiting on her image-obsessed father and extravagant older sister attempting to maintain their once lavish, now dwindling family estate and occasionally babysitting the children of her married younger sister. GET BOOK Persuasion by Jane Austen Summary