Jane Austen
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) was an English writer, most known for Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion.
- Jane AustenJane Austen, the world renowned English author, completed just six works during her time and yet manages to command a legion of fans around the world. Her timeless stories have been turned into a plethora of movies, television shows, and modern adaptations in addition to being translated into multiple languages to cross cultural boundaries. Today she remains as popular as ever and is revered as much as any literary figure in the history of the English language.
- Jane Austen CentreThe Jane Austen Centre offers you a snapshot of life during Regency times and explores how living in this magnificent city affected Jane Austen and her writing.
- Jane Austen Society of North AmericaJane Austen (1775-1817), one of England’s foremost novelists, was never publicly acknowledged as a writer during her lifetime.
Research & Reference
- Jane Austen: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Jane Austen. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Jane Austen's Fiction ManuscriptsThe Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition gathers together in the virtual space of the web some 1100 pages of fiction written in Jane Austen’s own hand. Through digital reunification, it is now possible to access, read, and compare high quality images of original manuscripts whose material forms are scattered around the world in libraries and private collections.
- Jane Austen Collection at Goucher CollegeThe Jane Austen Collection at Goucher was founded with the bequest of Alberta Hirshheimer Burke (1906–1975), a 1928 alumna of the college. Shortly after marrying Henry G. Burke in 1930, Alberta began what would become a lifetime passion project of building what she called her “Austen archive.”
Streaming Media
- Austen: The Life and Work of Jane AustenJane Austen produced some of the finest novels in English literature. The film covers her life and ends with an overview of her work.
- EmmaBeautiful, clever, and rich Emma Woodhouse is convinced she is good at matchmaking after her older sister and her governess both marry suitable husbands. No matter that as Mr Knightley drily observes, in reality, she had nothing to do with these relationships. Yet Emma, certain of her talents, plays a dangerous game as she persuades her new friend, the young, pretty and socially inferior Harriet to reject an advantageous marriage proposal to a local farmer in favour of dashing Mr Elton. So begins a story which challenges Emma's naivety, her social preconceptions and her relationship with Knightley. Fresh and funny, this perceptive adaptation, featuring a stellar cast, brings Jane Austen's comic masterpiece to life.
- Jane AustenEnglish author Jane Austen lived from 1775 to 1817. Her novels are highly prized not only for their light irony, humor, and depiction of contemporary English country life, but also for their serious underlying qualities. Austen wrote six major novels including "Sense and Sensibility", "Pride and Prejudice", and "Emma".
- The Life and Works of Jane Austen: Great Courses SeriesOver the course of the 24 lessons of The Life and Works of Jane Austen, you will get invaluable insight into Austen's everyday reality in the elegant and tumultuous Regency period and a more thorough understanding of her influence and lasting legacy.
- Pride and PrejudiceThis acclaimed adaptation of Jane Austen's most famous novel stars the great Laurence Olivier as Darcy, who first scorns and then falls in love with the charming Elizabeth Bennet, played by Greer Garson. Aldous Huxley assisted with the screenwriting. The New York Times called the production "a crisp and crackling satire." Also starring Maureen O'Sullivan and Mary Boland. Directed by Robert Z. Leonard.
- The Real Jane AustenIllustrated with clips from movie and television adaptations of her novels, this program takes a visually rich approach to understanding the woman behind such classics as Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. An extensive biographical and psychological profile of the author provides insight into what life was like for a woman in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Filmed at key locations, including Bath and Austen’s later home in Chawton, the program also shatters the myth that she lived the elegant Regency life of one of her heroines. A BBCW Production.
- Sense And SensibilityFrom acclaimed writer Andrew Davies comes this enchanting new adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel about love and marriage. Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve when she falls in love with the charming but unsuitable John Willoughby, ignoring her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Elinor, sensitive to social convention, struggles to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Will the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love?
Perspectives & Author's Works
Emma
Beautiful, clever, rich - and single Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protigie Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emmais often seen as Jane Austin's most flawless work. This edition includes a new chronology, additional suggestions for further reading and the original Penguin Classics introduction by Tony Tanner.
Jane Austen at Home
"Jane Austen at Home offers a fascinating look at Jane Austen's world through the lens of the homes in which she lived and worked throughout her life. The result is a refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and a beautifully nuanced exploration of gender, creativity, and domesticity."--Amanda Foreman, bestselling author of Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire Take a trip back to Jane Austen's world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen's childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses--both grand and small--of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life. In places like Steventon Parsonage, Godmersham Park, Chawton House and a small rented house in Winchester, Worsley discovers a Jane Austen very different from the onewho famously lived a 'life without incident'. Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but--in the end--a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy. Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley'sJane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world's favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home.
Pride and Prejudice
Introduction by Anna Quindlen * Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the "most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author's works," and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as "irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be."
Jane Austen's England
A cultural snapshot of everyday life in the world of Jane Austen Jane Austen, arguably the greatest novelist of the English language, wrote brilliantly about the gentry and aristocracy of two centuries ago in her accounts of young women looking for love. Jane Austen’s England explores the customs and culture of the real England of her everyday existence depicted in her classic novels as well as those by Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Drawing upon a rich array of contemporary sources, including many previously unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and personal letters, Roy and Lesley Adkins vividly portray the daily lives of ordinary people, discussing topics as diverse as birth, marriage, religion, sexual practices, hygiene, highwaymen, and superstitions. From chores like fetching water to healing with medicinal leeches, from selling wives in the marketplace to buying smuggled gin, from the hardships faced by young boys and girls in the mines to the familiar sight of corpses swinging on gibbets, Jane Austen’s England offers an authoritative and gripping account that is sometimes humorous, often shocking, but always entertaining.
Persuasion
'In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed' Virginia Woolf Jane Austen's moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she was persuaded by others to break off her engagement to poor, handsome naval captain Frederick Wentworth. What happens when they meet again is movingly told in Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, and a mature, tender love story tinged with heartache. Edited with an Introduction by Gillian Beer
Northanger Abbey
Penguin Classics relaunch During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances- flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and and optimistic of Jane Austen's works.
Jane Austen's Letters
Jane Austen's letters afford a unique insight into the daily life of the novelist: intimate and gossipy, observant and informative, they bring alive her family and friends, her surroundings and contemporary events with a freshness unparalleled in modern biographies. R W Chapman's ground-breaking edition of the Letters first appeared in 1932, and a second edition followed twenty years later. For this third edition Le Faye has added new material that has come to light since 1952, and reordered the letters into their correct chronological sequence. She has provided new biographical, topographical and general indexes, discreet annotation, and information on watermarks, postmarks and other physical details of the manuscripts. The edition has also been redesigned for ease of reading and reference.