About the books:
All six completed novels in one volume a solid, practical object for the reader who wants the complete Austen in hand rather than scattered across six shelves.
Spring Books produced these collected editions with no-nonsense readability in mind; this is a copy meant to be used.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Age related tanning to pages.
All pages well bound.
First blank pages contains a partially removed school awards badge.
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About the Author:
Jane Austen (1775 to 1817)
Born in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children in a clergyman's house with more books than money, Austen came to her understanding of constraint early and from the inside. Her father kept a large library and encouraged her. She began writing as a child biting parody, satirical histories, melodrama played for laughs and the voice in the juvenilia is already recognisably hers: precise, amused, merciless.
She lived the conditions she wrote about. Genteel poverty, dependence on family, a social world in which a woman's future turned almost entirely on whom she married and whether he was solvent. She came close to marriage once accepted a proposal in 1802, then withdrew it the next morning with no recorded explanation, which tells you something. She never married. She lived with her parents and then her mother and sister, moved between Bath (which she found dispiriting) and Hampshire, and did most of her serious writing at a small table in the sitting room at Chawton Cottage, on scraps of paper she could hide quickly when visitors arrived. She refused to have the creaking door oiled so she'd have warning.
The six novels Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (both 1817, posthumous) were published anonymously, the cover reading only "By a Lady." They are set almost entirely in drawing rooms and country houses, confined to the social rituals of a narrow class in rural England, and contain almost no direct reference to the Napoleonic Wars raging across the Channel or the industrial transformation of the country around them. This has been held against her. It shouldn't be. The small canvas was a choice, and within it she conducted an investigation as rigorous as anything her contemporaries were doing in philosophy proper: into judgment, self-deception, the conditions under which a person can actually know themselves or anyone else, and the economics of human feeling in a society that had reduced everything love, respect, virtue to the marriage market.
Her primary technical instrument was free indirect discourse, which she brought to a precision no English novelist before her had managed. The narrative voice inhabits a character's consciousness so completely that you cannot always locate the irony you are inside Elizabeth Bennet's certainty and outside it simultaneously, watching her be wrong in ways she cannot see. This is harder than it sounds. It requires the novelist to hold two perspectives at once without collapsing into either, and Austen does it so smoothly it tends to read as wit rather than technique. The wit is the technique.
Her influences were Richardson's epistolary intimacy and marriage plots; Fielding's ironic narrator; Samuel Johnson's moral seriousness, whose cadences she absorbed and quietly subverted; and the Gothic fiction she took apart with gleeful precision in Northanger Abbey. She revered Johnson above almost everyone.
Henry James read her with the professional admiration of a craftsman recognising superior work, and his entire apparatus of consciousness and point of view runs directly through her. Virginia Woolf wrote about her with barely concealed envy. Charlotte Brontë disliked her intensely found her cold, unfeeling, too controlled which is one of the more revealing critical misjudgments in literary history and says more about Brontë than about Austen. The domestic realist novel in English is essentially her inheritance, claimed or unclaimed by everyone who came after.
She died at 41 in Winchester, likely of Addison's disease, having corrected the proofs of Persuasion while ill. It is the most openly emotional of the novels, and contains a speech about women and constancy Anne Elliot arguing that women love longer when hope is gone that does not feel like satire at all.
