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"Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkable pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister's...was more striking."
As the title of Jane Austen's first published novel suggests, the difference between two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, lies not only in their appearance but also in their temperament. Yet Sense and Sensibility not only contrasts Elinor's good sense, her readiness to observe social forms and Marianne's impulsive candour, her warm but excessive sensibility; it also highlights their shared predicament in the face of a competitive marriage market. The sisters' parallel experience of love, and its threatened loss, causes both to readjust and question their own values. Jane Austen's satirical powers of observation and expression spare no one in this lively study of the constraints placed on gentry women in the eighteenth century.
Ros Ballaster's introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition discusses Sense… Read More

Northanger Abbey was among the last of Jane Austen's novels to be published, in 1818, but the first to be written, mostly in 1798-9. Centred on the loves and friendships of Catherine Morland, an endearing young girl extremely fond of novel-reading, it remains the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen's novels.
During an eventful season in Bath, Catherine meets the sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney who invite her to stay at their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There Catherine runs into dangers, imaginary and real, and learns how to tell the difference between books and real life, false friends and true.
For this completely new edition, Marilyn Butler provides an accurate text based on the first edition complete with introduction and notes. By placing Northanger Abbey firmly in its literary and topical context, Marilyn Butler shows that it is a more sophisticated novel than is often thought, and a sharp social commentary on a consumerist world to which modern readers can easily relate.

Few readers have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet. Her early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy - who is quite the most handsome and eligible bachelor in the whole of English literature - is a misjudgement only matched in folly by Darcy's arrogant pride. Their first impressions give way to truer feelings in a comedy profoundly concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved.
Vivien Jones, in her new introduction to this Penguin Classics edition, shows how their romance is inseparable from the important social and political debates of Austen's time, and describes Pride and Prejudice as "One of the most perfect, most pleasurable and most subtle - and therefore, perhaps, mostn dangerously persuasive - of romantic love stories."

"I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like," wrote Jane Austen in planning Emma (1816).
Yet few readers have failed to enjoy the ironies of Emma's high-handed vanity, or to warm to her liveliness and wit. White she devotes her formidable energies to matchmaking between friends and acquaintances in the village of Highbury, the plot turns on a romance of which she is wholly unaware. Her own falling in love delights readers who have been anticipating it as profoundly as it perplexes Emma, who has not.
"Of all great writers, she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness," wrote Virginia Woolf of Jane Austen. This is never more true than in Emma, as Fiona Stafford discusses in her introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition.

In Persuasion, her last novel, Jane Austen reveals her most mature dissection of people, place and social setting.
Like the earlier works Persuasion is a tale of love and marriage, told with the irony, insight and just evaluation of human conduct which sets her novels apart. But the heroine - like the author - is more mature; the tone of the writing is more sombre. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have met and separated years before. Their reunion forces a recognition of the false values that drove them apart. The characters who embody those values are the subjects of some of the most withering satire that Jane Austen ever wrote.

Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's most profound and perplexing novel.
Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis.
While Mansfield Park appears in some ways to continue where Pride and Prejudice left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges "the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse". This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.