Synopses & Reviews
Elizabeth Bennett is young, clever, and attractive, but she and her four sisters are in dire need of financial security in the shape of husbands. The arrival of the pleasant nice Mr. Bingley and the obscenely arrogant Mr. Darcy in the neighborhood turns all of their lives upside down in this witty drama of friendship, rivalry, enmity, and love.
Review
"The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist." —Independent
Review
"How could these novels ever seem remote . . . the gaiety is unextinguished today, the irony has kept its bite, the reasoning is still sweet, the sparkle undiminished, as comedies they are irresistibly and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be." —Eudora Welty
Review
"[Jane Austen] has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with." —Sir Walter Scott
Review
"An incredibly funny, very upmarket love story with an enchanting heroine and the perfect romantic hero: a tartar with a heart of gold." —Jilly Cooper
Review
"The Mozart opera of novels and again a transcendent union of structure and content in which unhappy marriage is the reward for those who show a weakness of character and lifelong happiness is a province reserved only for those 'who truly know themselves.' " —Kate Atkinson
Review
"For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta Stone of literature." —Anna Quindlen
Review
"The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste." —Virginia Woolf
About the Author
JANE AUSTEN was born in Steventon rectory on December 16, 1775. Her family later moved to Bath, then to Southampton and finally to Chawton in Hampshire. She began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was twenty-two years old. It was originally called First Impressions and was initially rejected by the publishers and only published in 1813 after much revision. She published four of her novels in her lifetime, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were both published posthumously in 1818.