The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen: 6-Volume Set by Jane Austen, R. W. Chapman (Editor)

From Barnes & Noble

Charming, willful Emma Woodehouse amuses herself by planning other people's lives. When her interfering backfires, she learns a bitter lesson: well-intentioned busybodies are as resented as those motivated by ill will, and everyone should learn to respect the individuality of others.

From the Publisher

"R.W. Chapman's fine new edition has, among its other merits, the advantage of waking the Jane Austenite up.... The novels continue to live their own wonderful internal life...freshened and enriched by contact with the life of facts. His illustrations are beyond all praise."--E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest. This beautiful set provides the definitive text of Austen's six great comic masterpieces and her minor works (the latter include three high-spirited efforts written at about age fifteen; a charming fragment, The Watsons, which has been thought to be a sketch for Emma; and a tantalizing fragment, Sanditon, written in the last year of her life). All six volumes feature splendid early 19th-century illustrations as well as Chapman's detailed explanatory notes. Chapman has collated all the editions published in the author's lifetime and previously unpublished manuscripts, establishing an authoritative text that retains the punctuation, the spelling, and division into volumes of the originals. In addition, at the end of each work he supplies notes on textual matters and appendixes on such matters as the modes of address, or characters, or carriages and travel, as these seem warranted by the text. Additional changes have been incorporated by Mary Lascelles.

Library Journal

This is another case where a classic is being reprinted simply as a tie-in to a TV/feature film presentation. Libraries, nonetheless, can benefit by picking up a quality hardcover for a nice price.

What People Are Saying

Harold. Bloom
"To me, as an American critic, Emma seems the most Englilsh of English novels....It is Austin's masterpiece, the largest triumph of her vigorous art."

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