Three of Austen's smaller works, worthy of reading for both pleasure and study: Lady Susan, in which a widow seeks an advantageous second marriage; and the unfinished novels The Watsons and Sandition.
'I am tired of submitting my will to the caprices of others-of resigning my own judgement in deference to those to whom I owe no duty, and for whom I feel no respect.' The unfinished fictions collected here are the novels and other writing that Jane Austen did not publish. The protagonist of the earliest story is Lady Susan, a sexual predator and a brilliant and manipulative sociopath. The Watsons, a tale of riches to rags, is set in a village deep in mud and misery where the Watson sisters waste away, day after dull day, waiting for the suitors who never appear. Sanditon, the novel interrupted by the author's death, is a topical satire on the niche marketing campaign waged by investors in the latest seaside resort, the fictional Sanditon, situated on England's over-supplied south coast. If The Watsons shares the disturbed life of a Chekhov short story, Sanditon's cast of eccentrics anticipates the zany world of Dickens. Experimental and sharp-elbowed, all three probe new areas of invention and push out beyond what we expect to find in a novel by Jane Austen. This edition collects together all Austen's unpublished adult fiction, poetry, and related writings, written in her late teens, in her late twenties, and in the year she died, aged forty-one. They contribute more than a dash of discomfort to our modern image of the romantic novelist and reveal Jane Austen's development as a writer.
The Watsons is an abandoned novel by Jane Austen, completed by her niece. The story tells about the widowed priest and his six children, four of which are daughters wishing to get married t a rich man. Although one of the daughters, Emma, was raised by their rich childless aunt. As a result, she is better educated than her other three sisters and has different values. The pursuit for love and wealthy admirers and the opposition between sisters lead to mingled affairs, romantic love stories, and exciting adventures.
In 1834, Charlotte Brontë and her brother Branwell created the imaginary kingdom of Angria in a series of tiny handmade books. Continuing their saga some years later, the five 'novelettes' in this volume were written by Charlotte when she was in her early twenties, and depict a aristocratic beau monde in witty, racy and ironic language. She creates an exotic, scandalous atmosphere of intrigue and destructive passions, with a cast ranging from the ageing rake Northangerland and his Byronic son-in-law Zamorna, King of Angria, to Mary Percy, Zamorna's lovesick wife, and Charles Townshend, the cynical, gossipy narrator. Together the tales provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind and creative processes of the young writer who was to become one of the world's great novelists.
Sanditon, Lady Susan, & The History of England: The Juvenilia and Shorter Works of Jane Austen is a rare collection is a must for all Jane-ites, representing what Richard Church regarded as Jane Austen's literary work-basket. It contains not only her hilarious History of England, illustrated by her favourite sister Cassandra, but the unfinished Sanditon, the novel of her maturity on which she was working at her death, aged forty-two. Also included are the two epistolary novels, Lady Susan and Love and Freindship [sic], and other, shorter works: The Watsons, Catharine, Lesley Castle, Evelyn, Frederic and Elfrida, Jack and Alice, Edgar and Emma, Henry and Eliza and The Three Sisters. This beautiful edition also features an introduction by Kathryn White. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.
With an Introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Nicholas Seager. This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen's manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Freindship [sic], and The History of England.
Collects three lesser-known works by one of the nineteenth century's greatest authors: Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon. This book examines the works in the context of her major novels and her life, and discusses the social background of her fiction.
Collecting three lesser-known works by one of the nineteenth century's greatest authors, Jane Austen's Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon is edited with an introduction by Margaret Drabble in Penguin Classics. These three short works show Austen experimenting with a variety of different literary styles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of social classes and settings. The early epistolary novel Lady Susan depicts an unscrupulous coquette, toying with the affections of several men. In contrast, The Watsons is a delightful fragment, whose spirited heroine Emma Watson finds her marriage opportunities limited by poverty and pride. Written in the last months of Austen's life, the uncompleted novel Sanditon, set in a newly established seaside resort, offers a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and speculators, and shows an author contemplating a the great social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution with a mixture of scepticism and amusement. Margaret Drabble's introduction examines these three works in the context of Jane Austen's major novels and her life, and discusses the social background of her fiction. This edition features a new chronology. Jane Austen (1775-1817) was extremely modest about her own genius but has become one of English literature's most famous women writers. Austen began writing at a young age, embarking on what is possibly her best-known work, Pride and Prejudice, at the age of 22. She was also the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park. If you enjoyed Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon, you may like Charlotte Brontë's Tales of Angria, also available in Penguin Classics. 'In [Sanditon] she exploits her greatest gifts, her management of dialogue and her skill with monologue. The book feels open and modern ... as vigorous and inventive as her earlier work' Carol Shields