The Jane Austen Omnibus
“In the case of my aunt [Jane Austen], it was not only that her course of life was unvaried, but that her own disposition was remarkably calm and even. There was in her nothing eccentric or angular; no ruggedness of temper; no singularity of manner; none of the morbid sensibility or exaggeration of feeling, which not unfrequently accompanies great talents, to be worked up into a picture. Hers was a mind well balanced on a basis of good sense, sweetened by an affectionate heart, and regulated by fixed principles; so that she was to be distinguished from many other amiable and sensible women only by that peculiar genius which shines out clearly enough in her works, but of which a biographer can make little use.”
J. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen
Jane Austen commenced writing in her adolescence and continued right up to her untimely death in 1817. Her novels are reflections of the socially constricted world in which she lived, and the plots are built around the search of one or more young women for a suitable spouse. Austen's works are noted for the perceptive elegance of her prose and for vigor and detail of characterization. Celebrated critic F. R. Leavis considered Austen as one of the four great English novelists, along with George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.
This collection contains the following titles:
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park and Lovers' Vows (1814)
Emma (1816)
Works published posthumously:
Northanger Abbey (1818)
Persuasion (1818)
Lady Susan (1871)
Unfinished works:
The Watsons (1871); completed by L. Oulton (1923)
Sanditon: Fragment of a Novel (1925)
Praise