This edition, featuring an Introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Nicholas Seager, gathers together Jane Austen’s earliest experiments in fiction alongside the novels she left unfinished at her premature death in 1817. Austen’s fragmentary juvenilia reveal her developing her own sense of narrative form even as she parodied the popular fiction of her day. Among the highlights is Lady Susan, a wickedly funny epistolary novel following a captivating but unscrupulous widow determined to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons, meanwhile, explores family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank – themes that would come to define her major novels – while Sanditon finds Austen turning her acute powers of social observation on a newly fashionable seaside resort. Rounding out the collection are shorter fictions surviving in Austen’s manuscripts, among them the critically acclaimed Catharine, Love and Freindship [sic], and The History of England.
ISBN 13: 9781840226966
Author: Jane Austen
