Their high spirits, hilarity, and control offer delicious proof that Austen was an artist "born, not made."įrom the Back Cover When the English-speaking world fell in love with Jane Austen's six great novels, hungering for more, the hunt began, of course, for any unpublished manuscripts she may have left behind. The special joy of this collection lies in Austen's juvenilia-tiny novels, the enchantingly funny Love and Freindship, comic fragments, and a (very) partial history of England-romping miniatures that she wrote in her teens. Lady Susan's subtle, single-minded, and ruthless pursuit of power makes the reader regret that Austen never again wrote a novel with a scheming widow for its heroine.
The novella Lady Susan is a miniature masterpiece, featuring Austen's only villainous protagonist. The Watsons, begun in 1804 but never completed, tells the story of a young woman who was raised by a rich aunt and who finds herself shipped back to the comparative poverty and social clumsiness of her own family. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen observing the birth pangs of the culture of commerce, as her country-bred heroine, a foolish baronet, a family of hypochondriacs, and a mysterious West Indian heiress collide against the background hum of real-estate development at a seaside resort. Sanditon might have been Austen's greatest novel had she lived to finish it.
Readers of Jane Austen's six great novels are left hungering for more, and more there is: the marvelous unpublished manuscripts she left behind, collected here.
0 kommentar(er)
