BOOKS + WEB SITES
BOOKS
For readers wondering where to start, Jane Austen's six novels, in order of highly personal preference, are:
(You may order any of these books by clicking on the title)
Pride and Prejudice, 1813:
The flaws in the title separate Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, aided by their families -- his snooty and hers irresponsible. Elizabeth -- intelligent and and spirited, if a bit too enamored of her own judgment -- is the quintessential Austen woman.
paperback, $3.95
hardcover, $15.30
paperback $3.95
hardcover, $13.50
audiobook, $23.95Emma, 1815:
"Handsome, clever and rich," Emma Woodhouse has nothing better to do than coddle her hypochondriac father and matchmake. Believing herself a shrewd judge of the human heart, Emma proves invariably, and amusingly, wrong.
paperback, $3.50
hardcover, $18.00
audiobook, $23.95Sense and Sensibility, 1811:
Two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, personify, respectively, the qualities in the title. Austen skewers the extravagant emotional displays and self-indulgence of Romanticism, but allows that even sensible people fall in love.
paperback, $3.95
hardcover, $14.36
audiobook, $16.95
Diaries & Screenplay by Emma Thompson
hardcover, $20.66Northanger Abbey, 1817:
Gothic-mad Catherine Morland visits the eponymous abbey and seeks intrigue and horror behind every door. Needless to say, she makes a fool of herself in the process, to excellent satirical effect.
paperback, $3.95
hardcover, $13.50
audiobook, $17.00Mansfield Park, 1814:
Meek, poor, downtrodden Fanny Price tends to irritate Austen fans. Living with rich relations, she suffers much, and saintedly, finding vindication in the end.
paperback, $4.50
hardcover, $18.00Other Austen writings include juvenalia (mostly satires), light verse, the "wicked" epistolary novella "Lady Susan," and various later fragments.
WEB RESOURCES
The best place to find annotated HTML texts of all of Austen's work is The Jane Austen Information Page, an impressive labor of love created by Henry Churchyard (yes!) at the University of Texas at Austin (yes again!).
The massive Churchyard site includes biographical information (family history, genealogical charts); poems about Austen (featuring some of Rudyard Kipling's most embarrassing moments); bibliographies; links to academic articles; notes on the social context of Austen's novels; lists of sequels and film versions; surveys of Austen's literary reputation (W.H. Auden wrote "You couldn't shock her more than she shocks me/Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass."); graphics files of the few Austen portraits, maps and her family's coat-of-arms; and a pointer to the AUSTEN-L mailing list.
A particular pleasure are Austen's letters, from which Churchyard has extracted some of the pithiest quotes. A favorite: "Next week [I] shall begin operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend."
The Goucher Library uses its Web site to tantalizingly catalog its Jane Austen collection, which features first and early editions and a historical novelist's dream: detailed information on period floor plans, domestic and landscape architecture, furniture, even fabric and wallpaper samples. Here you can learn about donor Alberta Burke's life-long obsession with Austen, which took the form of 10 volumes of notebooks listing "references and allusions to Jane Austen" from a variety of written and performing arts, and discover that Jane Austen has been translated into Italian more often than any other language.
