LOVE AND STATUS: Jane Austen and Her
Forerunners
If you love Jane
Austen's novels, you should check her complete works and the
works of other British women novelists from the same era and
just before. If you are addicted to romantic love
novels, get your fix here. 
According to Wikipedia: "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 have gained 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 into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth.[B] 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."
Jane Austen's Novels, all eight of them, plus two books about her
This collection includes all of Jane Austen's novels: Love and Friendship, Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. This file also includes three books about Jane Austen: A Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh (1798-1874), her nephew; and A Book of Sibyls: Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Opie, Miss Austen by Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie).
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Her novels sold individually: Love and Friendship and Other Early Works, including Lesley Castle, The History of England, Collection of Letters, and Scraps by Jane Austen
According to Wikipedia: "Love and Freindship [sic] is a juvenile story by Jane Austen, dated 1790. From the age of eleven until she was eighteen, Jane Austen wrote her tales in three notebooks. The notebooks still exist – one in the Bodleian Library; the other two in the British Museum. They include among others Love and Freindship, written when Jane was fourteen, and The History of England, when she was fifteen. Written in epistolary form, like her later unpublished novella, Lady Susan, Love and Freindship is thought to be one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family; it was dedicated to her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, "La Comtesse de Feuillide". The installments, written as letters from the heroine Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend Isabel, may have come about as nightly readings by the young Jane in the Austen home. Love and Freindship (the misspelling is one of many in the story) is clearly a parody of romantic novels Austen read as a child. This is clear even from the subtitle, "Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love", which completely undercuts the title. In form, it resembles a fairy tale as much as anything else, featuring wild coincidences and turns of fortune, but Austen is determined to lampoon the conventions of romantic stories, right down to the utter failure of romantic fainting spells, which always turn out badly for the female characters. In this story one can see the development of Austen's sharp wit and disdain for romantic sensibility, so characteristic of her later novels."
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Lady Susan by Jane Austen
According to Wikipedia: "Lady Susan is a short epistolary novel by Jane Austen, possibly written in 1794 but not published until 1871. This epistolary novel, an early complete work that the author never submitted for publication, describes the schemes of the main character—the widowed Lady Susan—as she seeks a new husband for herself, and one for her daughter. Although the theme, together with the focus on character study and moral issues, is close to Austen's published work (Sense and Sensibility was also originally written in the epistolary form), its outlook is very different, and the heroine has few parallels in 19th-century literature. Lady Susan is a selfish, attractive woman, who tries to trap the best possible husband while maintaining a relationship with a married man. She subverts all the standards of the romantic novel: she has an active role, she's not only beautiful but intelligent and witty, and her suitors are significantly younger than she is (in contrast with Sense and Sensibility and Emma, which feature marriages of men who are sixteen years older than their wives). Although the ending includes a traditional reward for morality, Lady Susan herself is treated much more mildly than the adulteress in Mansfield Park, who is severely punished."
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Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
According to Wikipedia: "Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication, though she had previously made a start on Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. According to Cassandra Austen's Memorandum, Susan (as it was first called) was written approximately during 1798–99. It was revised by Austen for the press in 1803, and sold in the same year for £10 to a London bookseller, Crosby & Co., who decided against publishing. In 1817, the bookseller was content to sell it back to the novelist's brother, Henry Austen, for the exact sum — £10 — that he had paid for it at the beginning, not knowing that the writer was by then the author of four popular novels. The novel was further revised before being brought out posthumously in late December 1817 (1818 given on the title-page), as the first two volumes of a four-volume set with Persuasion."
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Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
According to Wikipedia: "Sense and Sensibility is a novel by Jane Austen, and was her first published work when it appeared in 1811 under the pseudonym "A Lady". A work of romantic fiction, Sense and Sensibility is set in southwest England between 1792 and 1797, and portrays the life and loves of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. The novel follows the young ladies to their new home, a meagre cottage on a distant relative's property, where they experience love, romance and heartbreak. The philosophical resolution of the novel is ambiguous: the reader must decide whether sense and sensibility have truly merged."
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
According to Wikipedia: "Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London. Though the story is set at the turn of the 19th century, it retains a fascination for modern readers, continuing near the top of lists of "most loved books" such as The Big Read. It has become one of the most popular novels in English literature and receives considerable attention from literary scholars. Modern interest in the book has resulted in a number of dramatic adaptations and an abundance of novels and stories imitating Austen's memorable characters or themes. To date, the book has sold some 20 million copies worldwide."
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Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
According to Wikipedia: "Mansfield Park is a novel by Jane Austen, written at Chawton Cottage between February 1811 and 1813. It was published in May 1814 by Thomas Egerton, who published Jane Austen's two earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice... Mansfield Park is the most controversial of Austen's major novels. Regency critics praised the novel's wholesome morality, but many modern readers find Fanny's timidity and disapproval of the theatricals difficult to sympathise with and reject the idea (made explicit in the final chapter) that she is a better person for the relative privations of her childhood. Jane Austen's own mother thought Fanny "insipid", and many other readers have found her priggish and unlikeable. Other critics point out that she is a complex personality, perceptive yet given to wishful thinking, and that she shows courage and grows in self-esteem during the latter part of the story. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin, who is generally rather critical of Fanny, argues that "it is in rejecting obedience in favour of the higher dictate of remaining true to her own conscience that Fanny rises to her moment of heroism." But Tomalin reflects the ambivalence that many readers feel towards Fanny when she also writes: "More is made of Fanny Price's faith, which gives her the courage to resist what she thinks is wrong; it also makes her intolerant of sinners, whom she is ready to cast aside." The story contains much social satire, targeted particularly at the two aunts."
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Emma by Jane Austen
According to Wikipedia: "Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-Regency England; she also creates a lively comedy of manners among her characters. Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich." Emma, however, is also rather spoiled, headstrong, and self-satisfied; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives, and her imagination and perceptions often lead her astray."
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Persuasion by Jane Austen
According to Wikipedia: "Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emma, completing it in August 1816. She died, aged 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December that year (but dated 1818). Persuasion is linked to Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume and published together, but also because both stories are set partly in Bath, a fashionable city with which Jane Austen was well acquainted, having lived there from 1801 to 1805. Besides the theme of persuasion, the novel evokes other topics, such as the Royal Navy, in which two of Jane Austen's brothers ultimately rose to the rank of admiral. As in Northanger Abbey, the superficial social life of Bath—well known to Jane Austen, who spent several relatively unhappy and unproductive years there—is portrayed extensively and serves as a setting for the second half of the book. In many respects Persuasion marks a break with Austen's previous works, both in the more biting, even irritable satire directed at some of the novel's characters and in the regretful, resigned outlook of its otherwise admirable heroine, Anne Elliot, in the first part of the story. Against this is set the energy and appeal of the Royal Navy, which symbolizes for Anne and the reader the possibility of a more outgoing, engaged, and fulfilling life, and it is this worldview which triumphs for the most part at the end of the novel."
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Books About Jane Austen
A Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-LeighAccording to Wikipedia: "A Memoir of Jane Austen is a biography of the novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817) published in 1869 by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. A second edition was published in 1871 which included previously unpublished Jane Austen writings. A family project, the biography was written by James Edward Austen-Leigh but owed much to the recollections of Jane Austen's many relatives. However, it was the decisions of her close friend and sister, Cassandra Austen, to destroy many of Jane's letters after her death that shaped the material available for the biography. Austen-Leigh described his "dear Aunt Jane" domestically, as someone who was uninterested in fame and who only wrote in her spare time. However, the manuscripts appended to the second edition suggest that Jane Austen was intensely interested in revising her manuscripts and was perhaps less content than Austen-Leigh described her. The Memoir does not attempt to unreservedly tell the story of Jane Austen's life. Following the Victorian conventions of biography, it kept much private information from the public, but family members disagreed over just how much should be revealed, for example, regarding Austen's romantic relationships.The Memoir introduced the public to the works of Jane Austen, generating interest in novels which only the literary elite had read up until that point. It remained the primary biographical work on the author for over half a century."
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A Book of Sibyls by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (AKA Miss Thackeray)
Biographical sketches of Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Opie, and Jane Austen, first published in 1883. According to Wikipedia: " Anne Isabella, Lady Ritchie, née Thackeray (9 June 1837 – 26 February 1919) was an English writer. She was the eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray.
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Forerunners of Jane Austen
Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay)
According to Wikipedia: "Frances Burney (13 June 1752 – 6 January 1840), also known as Fanny Burney and, after her marriage, as Madame d’Arblay, was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. She was born in Lynn Regis, now King’s Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to musical historian Dr Charles Burney (1726–1814) and Mrs Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–62). The third of six children, she was self-educated and began writing what she called her “scribblings” at the age of ten. In 1793, aged forty-two, she married a French exile, General Alexandre D'Arblay. Their only son, Alexander, was born in 1794. After a lengthy writing career, and travels that took her to France for more than ten years, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840."
Fanny Burney: Four Novels plus Diary and Letters
Four novels by Fanny Burney, plus her Diary and Letters, with links to every chapter and letter. This file includes Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), The Wanderer (1814), plus The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay.
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Evelina by Fanny Burney
According to Wikipedia: "Evelina or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World is a novel written by English author Frances Burney and first published in 1778. It was first published anonymously, but its authorship was revealed by the poet George Huddesford in what Burney called a "vile poem. . In this 3-volume epistolary novel, title character Evelina is the unacknowledged but legitimate daughter of a dissipated English aristocrat, thus raised in rural seclusion until her 17th year. Through a series of humorous events that take place in London and the resort town of Hotwells, near Bristol, Evelina learns to navigate the complex layers of 18th-century society and earn the love of a distinguished nobleman. This sentimental novel, which has notions of sensibility and early romanticism, satirizes the society in which it is set and is a significant precursor to the work of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, whose novels explore many of the same issues."
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Cecilia by Fanny Burney
According to Wikipedia: "Cecilia, subtitled Memoirs of an Heiress, is a novel by Frances Burney, set in 1779 and published in 1782... Frances Burney had begun working on the novel in 1780, after her father, Dr. Charles Burney, and her literary mentor, Samuel Crisp, suppressed her first attempt at writing for the stage, The Witlings. Her disappointment in this venture, as well as the pressure she felt to produce a novel in order to capitalize on the success of her first work Evelina, seems to have placed considerable strain on Burney, and may have colored the tone and content of her second published work."
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Camilla by Fanny Burney
According to Wikipedia: "Camilla, subtitled A Picture of Youth, is a novel by Frances Burney, first published in 1796. Camilla deals with the matrimonial concerns of a group of young people: Camilla Tyrold and her sisters, the sweet tempered Lavinia and the deformed, but extremely kind, Eugenia, and their cousin, the beautiful Indiana Lynmere - and in particular, with the love affair between Camilla herself and her eligible suitor, Edgar Mandlebert. They have many hardships, however, caused by misunderstandings and mistakes, in the path of true love. An enormously popular eighteenth-century novel, Camilla is touched at many points by the advancing spirit of romanticism. As in Evelina, Burney weaves into her novel shafts of light and dark, comic episodes and gothic shudders, and creates many social, emotional, and mental dilemmas that illuminate the gap between generations."
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The Wanderer by Fanny Burney
According to Wikipedia: "The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties is Frances Burney’s last novel. Published in March 1814 by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, this historical novel with Gothic overtones set during the 1790s tells the story of a mysterious woman who attempts to support herself while hiding her identity. The novel focuses on the difficulties faced by women as they strive for economic and social independence. Begun in the 1790s, the novel took Burney fourteen years to complete. She worked on it sporadically while she wrote plays and was an exile in France. Although the first edition sold out on the strength of Burney's reputation, the scathing reviews of the novel caused it to sell poorly. Reviewers disliked its portrayal of women and its criticism of English society."
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The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (Fanny Burney)
According to Wikipedia: "The first entry in her journal was made on 27 March 1768, addressed to "Miss Nobody," and it extended over seventy-two years. A talented storyteller with a strong sense of character, Burney often wrote these “journal-diaries” as a form of correspondence with family and friends, recounting to them events from her life and her observations upon them. Her diary contains the record of her extensive reading out of her father’s library, as well the visits and behaviour of the various important artists who paid visits to their home. Frances and her sister Susanna were particularly close, and it was to this sister that Frances would correspond throughout her adult life, in the form of these journal-letters."
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Tales and Novels, all ten volumes, by Maria Edgeworth
All of her novels and short stories, including Belinda, Castle Rackrent, Murad the Unlucky, Tales of Fashionable Life, The Absentee, Patronage, Helen, Harrington, and Ormond. According to Wikipedia: "Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 – 22 May 1849) was a prolific Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held advanced views, for a woman of her time, on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo...Tales of Fashionable Life (1809 and 1812) is a 2-series collection of short stories which often focus on the life of a woman. The second series was particularly well received in England, making her the most commercially successful novelist of her age. After this, Edgeworth was regarded as the preeminent woman writer in England alongside Jane Austen... Having come to her literary maturity at a time when the ubiquitous and unvarying stated defense of the novel was its educative power, Maria Edgeworth was among the few authors who truly espoused the educator's role. Her novels are morally and socially didactic in the extreme."
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