Jane Austen: The Works in Eight Volumes
Author: Jane Austen
Date Of Publication: Mar 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0211-6
Isbn: 1-4438-0211-5
Jane Austen’s novels remain among the best-loved works of English literature, both in her native Britain and throughout the world. For generations of readers, they have come to represent the essence of the Regency period, epitomising wit, elegance, and a vanished world of politeness and privilege, and harking back to a time of greater moral and social coherence. Austen is also a gentle satirist, justly celebrated for her ironically mocking depictions of the fashions and foibles of her age, and a moralist, known for the clarity of her moral vision and her penetrating psychological insight. For many readers, however, Austen’s novels are quite simply the most delightful and satisfying love stories of all time, and her characters the most believable of literary creations. Austen is thus most unusual in appealing to both scholarly and popular audiences.

As well as the completed novels in their canonical form, this edition includes all of Austen's surviving juvenilia, the early novel Lady Susan and the two fragments discovered incomplete at the author's death. The texts have all been completely retypeset for this edition. Each volume is accompanied by a reading list and brief introduction dealing with context (within and beyond Austen's oeuvre) and reception; the edition as a whole has a new critical introduction and up-to-date bibliography. These have been written specially for this edition by Austen scholar Katie Halsey, of the University of London Institute of English Studies.

Publisher's Note to the Complete Works of Jane Austen

This edition of the Works contains Austen's six completed mature novels, plus all the known surviving juvenilia, the early epistolary novel Lady Susan, and the two late novels left incomplete at Austen's death.

The contents of the volumes are:

Volume 1 (368 pp.): Critical introduction to the Works by Dr. Katie Halsey; Sense and Sensibility and Lady Susan (an early epistolary novel)

Volume 2 (304 pp.): Pride and Prejudice

Volume 3 (185 pp.): Northanger Abbey

Volume 4 (347 pp.): Mansfield Park

Volume 5 (365 pp.): Emma

Volume 6 (188 pp.): Persuasion

Volume 7 (205 pp.): Juvenilia

Volume 8 (93 pp.): The Watsons and Sanditon (the incomplete novels)

All of the Works have been newly typeset for this edition. The texts of The Watsons and Lady Susan are based on those published with J. E. Austen Leigh's memoir of Austen (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1883). The juvenilia are based on the first editions, in three volumes, printed from the manuscripts: Volume the First (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); Love and Freindship (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922); Volume the Third (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951). The text of Sanditon is based on the first edition from the manuscript (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). The texts of the published novels have been based on those available online from Project Gutenberg, with reference to Richard Bentley's 1833 collected edition.

Dr. Katie Halsey (Institute of English Studies, University of London) has contributed both an introduction to the Works as a whole, printed in volume 1, and a separate brief introduction to each volume.

Katie Halsey researches and teaches at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, having taught previously at the Universities of Cambridge and St Andrews. She has written and published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture, and currently works on the history of reading from 1450 to 1945. Katie is a lifetime devotee of Jane Austen’s works, and is the author of a book entitled Jane Austen and her Readers.

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