The Works of Jane Austen
In the early nineteenth century, while Napoleon was transforming Europe, the daughter of a rural English clergyman was quietly transforming literature. Few novelists were as far ahead of their time as Jane Austen was of hers. This volume collects her three best and most important works of fiction. Sense and Sensibility, Austen's first major novel, is the story of two sisters of opposing temperaments. Its central theme is the way these sisters are affected by the distances and secrets that separate them from the men they love. Elinor, practical and conventional, is the epitome of sense; Marianne, emotional and sentimental, is the essence of sensibility. Their mutual sufferings bring the sisters to an understanding of each other; and love triumphs when sense gives way to sensibility and sensibility gives way to sense. The romantic clash of two opinionated young people, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, provides the dramatic tension in Pride and Prejudice. The novel captures all the class consciousness of eighteenth-century English family life. The dialogue sparkles as it skewers the mores of the period. Yet these characters also transcend time and place. Emma represents the genius of Jane Austen in its full maturity. The story centers on Emma Woodhouse, a supremely confident young woman determined to arrange her own life and the lives of those around her in a pattern dictated by her romantic fantasies. Austen declared Emma a heroine "no one but myself will much like," but generations of readers have profoundly disagreed with her.