The best (and the best written) book about Austen that has appeared in the last three decades.--Nina Auerbach, Journal of English and Germanic Philology By looking at the ways in which Austen domesticates the gothic in Northanger Abbey, examines the conventions of male inheritance and its negative i[...]

In Jane Austen's works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seem[...]

An exploration of Austen's work against their historical and cultural backdrop to show precisely how she sets out the core themes of British morality. By situating the novels in such a remarkable era, Mona Scheuermann sharply defines Austen's view of the social contract.[...]

Jane Austen's famous story of Anne Elliot's love for a handsome but poor young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, whom her parents forbid her to marry. They meet again seven years later and Wentworth has become wealthy and successful, but he is angry at her rejection of him ...[...]

Rachel M. Brownstein considers Jane Austen as heroine, moralist, satirist, romantic, woman, and author, along with the changing notions of these categories over time and texts. She finds echoes of many of Austen's insights and techniques in contemporary Jane-o-mania, a commercially driven, eroticall[...]

The Jane Austen Treasury is a delightful collection of facts and insights into the life and times of the great novelist and the attitudes and customs that shaped both her and her work. Taking each of her novels in turn, and exploring both underlying themes and historical context, it reveals the comp[...]

Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Austen come to write novels that have commanded the att[...]

"Northanger Abbey "is both a perfectly aimed literary parody and a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naive but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine[...]

Of all Jane Austen's great and delightful novels, "Persuasion "is widely regarded as the most moving. It is the story of a second chance.
Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish Sir Walter Elliot, is woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen she fell in love with--and was engag[...]

In its marvelously perceptive portrayal of two young women in love, "Sense and Sensibility " is the answer to those critics and readers who believe that Jane Austen's novels, despite their perfection of form and tone, lack strong feeling.
Its two heroines--so utterly unlike each other-both under[...]