1 Introduction to Austen and Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen wrote only six complete novels. They are Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, persuasion. In these novels the life of the gentry, landowners and clergy at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is shown in detail. She knew her limits in her novels. One letter of September 1814 to her niece Anna gives a glimpse of her creative mind and the limits she sets for herself: "you are collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life; 3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on....."(Lefroy h: 156). In another letter which was given to her nephew -Edward, her brother's son, when Jane deprecates the acceptance of the self imposed limits of her...