Emma (Paperback)

Jane Austen was the daughter of a well-connected country clergyman in a small village in southern England, and was distantly related to the aristocracy. She had six brothers and a sister--Cassandra, her best friend and confidante. Although she often wrote about marriage and courtship, Austen never married, nor did her sister. The Austen household was lively, jolly, and bookish, and Jane and her siblings loved performing in amateur theatricals (a pastime which plays a vital part in the plot of her novel MANSFIELD PARK). Jane and Cassandra were taught mostly at home, and learned only the trivial accomplishments necessary to proper young women of the period--music, drawing, dancing, etc.--but Jane was also widely read in literature, including the classics. She began writing her witty, satirical novels to amuse her family, but eventually (1809), when she began writing more seriously, she kept her work secret. All together, she completed six novels that parody the social mores of the time, writing about middle-class provincial life with psychological insight and humor. In 1816, she became afflicted with Addison's disease; she died the next year at age 41 in Winchester, and was buried in the cathedral there. Her gravestone bears a long and affectionate inscription attesting to "the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind," but omitting any mention of her career as a writer. Austen is revered for her satirical portraits of English life, and for her use of the interior monologue to convey character--a relatively new device at the time she was writing. Her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, praised "the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment." Her work is also the prototype for a debased version of it, the perennially popular "Regency" romance. By the end of the 20th century, her work--the reputation of which had fluctuated widely since her death--became popular again, and was the source of several movies and TV adaptations.