Jane Austen Volume 1: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Persuasion

This volume, delightfully illustrated with Hugh Thompson's delicate drawings, contains three of Jane Austen's classic novels: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Persuasion.

Jane Austen is undoubtedly one of the finest English novelists: she paints on a small canvas, but with the most exquisitely detailed touch. Her novels sparkle with wit and humour; she lightly but tellingly satirizes the vanity, selfishness and pretension of mankind while creating a splendid gallery of living characters.

Jane Austen's novels are all set in the narrow world of eighteenth-century society, but her deep understanding of human nature and her penetrating observation of its follies and absurdities are timeless. Her work is as funny and fascinating as when it first appeared, and she is deservedly ranked among the classic authors.

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.

Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about 35 years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.