Jane Austen is one of the few novelists in world literature who is regarded as a "classic" and yet is widely read. As the contemporary novelist Fay Weldon puts it, for generations of students and the educated reading public in many countries, Austen's...

Jane Austen stands not only as a novelist central to the Romantic period but as one of the supreme prose fiction writers of all literature written in English. Her many admirers include Henry James and Virginia Woolf, both of whom she influenced. Yet...

"It is a truth universally acknowledged," wrote Jane Austen in the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, "that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." With this statement one of the great English novelists and most...

The English writer Jane Austen (1775-1817) was one of the most important novelists of the 19th century. In her intense concentration on the thoughts and feelings of a limited number of characters, Jane Austen creates as profound an understanding and as...