Jane Austen
1) Persuasion
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The story begins seven years after the broken engagement of Anne Elliot to then Commander Frederick Wentworth. Anne, then 19 years old, fell in love and accepted a proposal of marriage from the young naval officer. Wentworth was considered clever, confident, ambitious, and employed, but his low social status made Anne's friends and family view the Commander as an unfavorable partner...
In a letter to her niece Fanny Knight in March 1817, Austen wrote...
2) Emma
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Emma thinks she knows what is best for everybody, including herself. This is one of many editions of this 1815 novel. Emma, when first published in 1816, was written when Jane Austen was at the height of her powers. In it, we have her two greatest comic creations -- the eccentric Mr. Woodhouse and that quintissential bore, Miss Bates. In it, too, we have her most profound characterization: the witty, imaginative, self-deluded Emma, a heroine the author...
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"In the final months of Jane Austen's life, she began work on a new novel about social drama in the small seaside town of Sanditon, once a small fishing village and now a bustling spa town. In the story of Charlotte Heywood, a new arrival, Austen contemplated a changing society with a mixture of skepticism and amusement, and notably crafted her only character of color in the mixed-race heiress Miss Lambe. Though unfinished at the time of her death,...
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Lissie is the middle of three sisters, orphaned and taken in by their aunt and uncle. Both she and her older sister, Jenny, work in the family restaurant while pursuing their education and career dreams. When Lissie accidentally serves a dish containing shellfish paste to an allergic customer, she runs afoul of the wealthy Lin family. Their golden boy, Preston, star swimmer and Stanford Ph.D. student, is as handsome as he is self-righteous. Lissie...
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"A whole new side of Mr. Darcy-- He's the best big brother, generous to a fault. Protective, never teases. But over his dead body is any rogue or fortune hunter going to get near his little sister! (Unfortunately, any gentleman who wants to court Georgiana is going to have the same problem--) So how's a girl ever going to meet the gentleman of her dreams?"--Back cover.
12) Northanger Abbey
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In this modern retelling of Austen's classic, bookish minister's daughter Cat Morland joins her well-to-do friends in Edinburgh and falls for an up-and-coming lawyer who may harbor unsettling secrets.
15) Northanger Abbey
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In 18th century Bath, a girl bursting with freshness and passion for macabre Gothic novels experiences intrigue, adventure, and romance, especially when the romantic Henry Tilney invites her to his ancestral home.
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While Jane and Lizzie plan a lavish ball at Pemberley, the Darcys' second son falls in love with the Collins' daughter, first-born Juliet Darcy is almost lured into an elopement, and Georgiana's timid daughter Lucy is the new target of Miss Caroline Bingley's meddling. The Darcy's Give a Ball is a charming and very amusing imagining of the next generation of Jane Austen's beloved characters from Pride and Prejudice and other novels, where all the...
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"England, 1813. Nineteen-year-old Catherine Bennet lives in the shadow of her two eldest sisters, Elizabeth and Jane, who have both made excellent marriages. No one expects Kitty to amount to anything. Left at home in rural Hertfordshire with her neurotic and nagging mother, and a father who derides her as "silly and ignorant," Kitty is lonely, diffident and at a loss as to how to improve her situation. When her world unexpectedly expands to London...
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Charlotte Collins, née Lucas, is the respectable wife of Hunsford's vicar, and sees to her duties by rote: keeping house, caring for their adorable daughter, visiting parishioners, and patiently tolerating the lectures of her awkward husband and his condescending patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Intelligent, pragmatic, and anxious to escape the shame of spinsterhood, Charlotte chose this life, an inevitable one so socially acceptable that its...
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"Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park." --Lionel Trilling
In this ingenious new twist on Mansfield Park, the famously meek Fanny Price--whom Jane Austen's own mother called "insipid"--has been utterly transformed; she is now a rich heiress who is spoiled, condescending, and generally hated throughout the county. Mary Crawford, on the other hand, is now as good as Fanny is bad, and suffers great indignities...