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Jane Austen

Jane Austen

  • Set in a small English village during 1812, this classic novel is one of the greatest love stories ever told!

    A poor country squire is trying to find husbands for his five daughters. When one of them, Elizabeth, meets rich Mr. Darcy at a dance, they don’t find much in common. But during the next few months, they overcome their differences and fall in love.

  • What can Jane Austen teach us about health? Prepare to have your bonnet blown …

    From the food secrets of Pride and Prejudice to the fitness strategies of Sense and Sensibility, there’s a modern health code hidden in the world’s most popular romances.

    Join Bryan Kozlowski as he unlocks this “health and happiness” manifesto straight from Jane Austen’s pen, revealing why her prescriptions for achieving total body “bloom” still matter in the twenty-first century. Whether that’s learning how to eat like Lizzie Bennet, exercise like Emma Woodhouse, or think like Elinor Dashwood, explore how Austen’s timeless body beliefs are more relevant, refreshing, and scientifically sensible now than ever before. After all, it’s still a truth universally acknowledged—Jane Austen’s heroines don’t get fat.

  • The provincial Bennet family, home to five unmarried daughters, is turned upside down when a wealthy bachelor takes up a house nearby.

    Mr. Bingley enhances his instant popularity by hosting a ball and taking an interest in the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane. Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy, Bingley's even wealthier friend, makes himself equally unpopular by his aloof disdain of country manners. Yet he is drawn in spite of himself to the spirited and intelligent Elizabeth Bennet, who proves to be his match in both wit and pride. Their sparkling repartee is a splendid performance of civilized sparring infused with unacknowledged romantic tension.

    Pride and Prejudice delightfully captures the affectations and rivalries of class-conscious English families in an age when status and security for women hung entirely on matrimonial ambitions. Austen's characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

    It is also the source of some of the most memorable characters ever written, from the fatuous Mr. Collins, whose proposal to Elizabeth is one of the finest comic passages in English literature, to the beloved heroine Elizabeth, whom the author herself deemed "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print."

  • In Persuasion, Austen’s last novel, she reveals the tale of love and marriage told with irony, insight, and an evaluation of human conduct. The characters, Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot, have met and separated years before. A reunion forces the recognition of the false values that drove them apart.

  • The last novel completed by Jane Austen before her death, Persuasion is often thought to reflect on the author’s own lost love.

    Sir Walter Elliot has raised his three daughters with his own sense of haughty pride. Elizabeth, at twenty-eight, has found no one good enough to marry, while Mary has, with some condescension, married the son of the local squire. The youngest, Anne, was persuaded to throw off her fiancé, Frederick Wentworth, eight years ago due to his lowly station in life.

    When Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars as a captain of wealth and rank, Anne must confront her remorse and her unrequited love for him as he appears to court another woman.

    This is a story of second chances, humility, and the perseverance of love.

  • Often considered Jane Austen’s finest work, Emma is the story of a charmingly self-deluded heroine whose naive matchmaking schemes often lead to substantial mortification. Emma, “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” Her own great fortune has blinded Emma to the true feelings and motivations of others and leads her to some hilarious misjudgments. But it is through her mistakes that Emma finds humility, wisdom, and true love. Told with the shrewd wit and delicate irony which have made Jane Austen a master of the English novel, Emma is a comic masterpiece whose fanciful heroine has gained the affection of generations of readers.

  • Jane Austen’s debut novel is a brilliant tragicomedy of flirtation and folly in which two sisters who represent “sense” and “sensibility,” or restraint and emotionalism, experience love and heartbreak in their own separate ways.

    One daughter, the impetuous Marianne, falls passionately in love with the dashing John Willoughby and makes no secret of her affections. Meanwhile, Elinor and the mild-mannered Edward Ferras feel a mutual attraction, yet neither has the directness to acknowledge it.

    When it is revealed that Willoughby is in fact an unscrupulous fortune hunter and that Edward is bound by a previous commitment to another woman, each sister’s romantic hopes are dashed. As they bear their grief in their different ways, Marianne learns from Elinor’s quiet restraint, while Elinor learns the value of Marianne’s candid expression.

    In the end, both sisters are happily settled, having each developed a more balanced approach to life and love.

  • Jane Austen's first major novel, a parody of the popular literature of the time, is an ironic tale of the romantic folly of men and women in pursuit of love, marriage, and money. The humorous adventures of young Catherine as she encounters "the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath" lead to some of Austen's most brilliant social satire. There is Catherine's hilarious liaison with a paragon of bad manners and boastfulness, her disastrous friendship with an unforgettably crass coquette, and a whirl of cotillion dances with their timeless mortifications. A visit to ancient Northanger Abbey, the ancestral home of the novel's handsome hero, excites the irrepressible Catherine's hopes of romance amid gothic horrors. But what awaits her there is a drama of a different kind. This novel is the most youthfully exuberant and broadly comic of Jane Austen's works.

  • Fanny Price, a poor relation of the rich Bertrams, is reluctantly adopted into the family to be brought up at Mansfield Park, where she is treated condescendingly. Only her cousin Edmund, a young clergyman, appreciates her fine qualities. Fanny soon falls in love with him, but Edmund is, unfortunately, drawn to the shallow and worldly Mary Crawford. Fanny’s quiet humility, steadfast loyalty, and natural goodness are matched against the wit and brilliance of her lovely rival. The tension is heightened when Henry Crawford, Mary’s equally sophisticated and flirtatious brother, takes an interest in Fanny.          

    Jane Austen’s subtle, satiric novel skillfully uses her characters’ emotional relationships to explore the social and moral values by which they attempt to order their lives.