Sanditon and Other Stories (Everyman Library Classics) - Hardcover

Jane Austen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857152255 ISBN 13: 9781857152258

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 1996

Synopsis

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About this title

From the Back Cover

When the English-speaking world fell in love with Jane Austen's six great novels, hungering for more, the hunt began, of course, for any unpublished manuscripts she may have left behind. Treasure was found, and all of it is in this volume that rounds out the Everyman's Library edition of Jane Austen. Sanditon is the novel she was working on in the last year of her life. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen observing the birth pangs of the culture of commerce. The setting is a seaside town that is being promoted as a resort. The country-bred heroine, the handsome baronet who models himself after irresistible seducers he has met in novels, the family of hypochondriacs, the mysterious West Indian heiress, and others, play out their satirical or romantic or melodramatic roles against a background hum of real-estate development: modern times loom. The Watsons, begun in 1804 but never completed, tells the story of a young woman, Emma Watson, who was raised by a rich aunt and is suddenly shipped back to the comparative poverty and social clumsiness of her own family: girls explicitly on the hunt for husbands. What husbands they find we will never know. But we can check our hopes that the appealing Emma will make the right choice (she is, incidentally, the only Austen heroine ever courted by a lord) against the author's plans for her, as recollected by Jane Austen's sister, Cassandra. Lady Susan, written before Pride and Prejudice, is a complete epistolary novel. It is Jane Austen's only novel whose protagonist is a villainess, and a denizen of sophisticated London society. The alluring Lady Susan subtly, single-mindedly, and ruthlessly pursues her own fortunes. She bullies her shyyoung daughter. She dissembles, she maneuvers, she manipulates. She makes the reader both pray for her comeuppance and regret that (as a modern novelist quoted in the preface remarks) Austen never again wrote a novel with a scheming widow for its heroine.

About the Author

Jane Austen was born in Steventon rectory on 16 December 1775. Her family later moved to Bath, then to Southampton and finally to Chawton in Hampshire. She began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was twenty-two years old. It was originally called First Impressions and was initially rejected by the publishers and only published in 1813 after much revision. She published four of her novels in her lifetime, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were both published posthumously in 1818.

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1857152255
• ISBN 13: 9781857152258
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 502