Jane Austen - The Jane Austen Collection - Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Northanger Abbey

With new found security and a more settled lifestyle, Austen found herself able to write once more. By 1811 she had become a published novelist with Sense and Sensibility . There followed, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1815. At about this time Austen began to feel unwell and suffered from a progressive disease, which saw her health decline. She continued to write but became increasingly infirm until she succumbed in December 1817 at the age of 41. Her final novel, Persuasion , was published posthumously along with Northanger Abbey shortly after her death. There is also a seventh, incomplete, manuscript named The Brothers or Sanditon , which she started to write in 1817, even though her health was deteriorating

There has been considerable speculation about the nature of Austen’s illness. The two most likely culprits are Addison’s disease and Hodgkin’s lymphoma, both of which were described and named later in the 19th century. It is known that she suffered bouts of fatigue and difficulty in walking. She eventually died in the City of Winchester and was laid to rest in Winchester Cathedral.

The wind of change was so strong following Austen’s short life that her novels fell out of favour quickly with the onset of the Victorian era. Her books continued to sell, but they were not considered fashionable, as people gravitated towards the gritty realism portrayed by Dickens, Hardy and their contemporaries. The public wanted to read about characters exposed to the harshness of life without privilege, as opposed to Austen’s characters whom were generally rather comfortable and concerned themselves with matters of little real consequence.

Austen was actually using elements of her own, relatively comfortable life to weave her tales of fiction, so to her they were genuine situations and circumstances worthy of analysis. She also never married, so her angst was focussed on pondering matters of the heart. In many ways she lived vicariously through her characters, allowing them to experience the intimacies that she craved, but that eluded her all of her life.

It is interesting to note that many contemporary authors choose to give their novels period settings as their plots often rely on rules of formality and etiquette and characters must behave in a certain way to ensure that a narrative will work. Jane Austen was living and writing in a time when such rules were part of polite society and can be seen as the originator of this plot devise. It is fair to say that societal rules reached their zenith of priggishness during Austen’s lifetime. It was all about defining oneself in terms of class and wealth, so that there were very clear guidelines about what one should and should not do and how one should behave.

Austen was herself born into a family at the lower end of the English hierarchical stratum known as the gentry, which was situated beneath the nobility. In modern terms she would have been considered well educated and privileged. This gave Austen a certain vantage point as a writer, for she rubbed shoulders with people both above and below her on the social scale.

Austen was a humanist and made it abundantly clear that she thought little of the notion that some people were better or worse than others simply through accident of birth. In essence, her literature is defined by her desire to express that it is what goes on inside a person that matters above and beyond other concerns. Austen makes theatre of the absurdities that she observes in polite society because she has an innate cynicism, but she always avoids being vitriolic in her prose.

It is this delicate balancing act between crafting an engaging narrative and passing comment with subtle allegory that made her novels a success then and now. Austen expertly translates her criticism of the human condition into witty and insightful prose. Through her satirical eye, the characters become relevant to the reader as they recognise elements or traits of themselves or others in the disparate personalities. Although such psychological connectives were more pertinent in society at the time that Austen was writing, they still resonate today because people frequently gravitate towards societal rules, albeit in a less formalized way. Therefore, it is still easy to relate to Austen’s stories through the experiences of her characters and the situations and events that arise in her novels are timeless and emotive.

Austen was not, however a romanticist. She was at the cutting edge of English literary fiction, just as the artist Joseph Turner was at the cutting edge of English painting. Both were born in the same year, 1775, and both used their creativity to document the modern world they knew. Austen is often described as a sentimental novelist, because her themes are primarily about the exploration of human feeling and emotion. This was a concept relatively new to society at the time, not least because everyday life hadn’t yet afforded people the luxury of the leisure time necessary for such self-indulgences. Indeed, during Austen’s lifetime it was still only the wealthy with time on their hands. Most were far more concerned with the hardships and realities of making a living and raising a family. That is largely why Austen’s novels focus so much on the upper echelons of society, as only the idle rich were not preoccupied by such matters of survival.

Austen’s life was short, but it spanned the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was in full spate. After her death, English literature made way for a new genre, realism, which saw novelists using their prose to illustrate the lives of the common man, woman and child who struggled to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, rife with disease, poverty, injustice, criminality and urbanization. Had Austen lived longer perhaps she would have responded and adapted to these new trends.

TITLE PAGE

VOLUME ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

VOLUME TWO

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

VOLUME THREE

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

‘My dear Mr Bennet,’ said his lady to him one day, ‘have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?’

Mr Bennet replied that he had not.

‘But it is,’ returned she; ‘for Mrs Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.’