Mehr lesen
Zusatztext "As nearly flawless as any fiction could be." —Eudora Welty Informationen zum Autor Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born in Hampshire, England, to George Austen, a rector, and his wife, Cassandra. Like many girls of her day, she was educated at home, where she began her literary career by writing parodies and skits for the amusement of her large family. Although Austen did not marry, she did have several suitors and once accepted a marriage proposal, but only for an evening. Although Austen never lived apart from her family, her work shows a worldly and wise sensibility. Her novels include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion , published together posthumously in 1818. Margaret Drabble is the highly acclaimed novelist, biographer, and editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature . Her novels include The Gates of Ivory , The Seven Sisters , and The Red Queen . Mary Balogh grew up in Wales and after graduating from University moved to Saskatchewan, Canada, to teach high school English. Her first Regency historical love story, A Masked Deception, was published in 1985. She has written more than seventy novels since then, including the N ew York Times bestselling Slightly sestet and Simply quartet. Klappentext Two sisters of opposing temperaments who share the pangs of new love provide the theme for Jane Austen’s dramatically human narrative. “I wish as well as everybody else to be perfectly happy but like everybody else it must be in my own way.” Elinor, practical and conventional, is the perfection of sense. Marianne, emotional and sentimental, is the embodiment of sensibility. To each comes the sorrow of unhappy love. Their mutual suffering brings a closer understanding between the two sisters—and true love finally triumphs when sense gives way to sensibility and sensibility gives way to sense. Jane Austen’s authentic representation of early-nineteenth-century middle-class provincial life, written with forceful insight and gentle irony, makes her novels the enduring works on the mores and manners of her time. With an Introduction by Margaret Drabble and an Afterword by Mary Balogh Leseprobe Sense and Sensibility, the first of those metaphorical bits of "ivory" on which Jane Austen said she worked with "so fine a brush," jackhammers away at the idea that to conjecture is a vain and hopeless reflex of the mind. But I'll venture this much: If she'd done nothing else, we'd still be in awe of her. Wuthering Heights alone put Emily Brontë in the pantheon, and her sister Charlotte and their older contemporary Mary Shelley might as well have saved themselves the trouble of writing anything but Jane Eyre and Frankenstein . Sense and Sensibility , published in 1811, is at least as mighty a work as any of these, and smarter than all three put together. And it would surely impress us even more without Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815) towering just up ahead. Austen wrote its ur-version, Elinor and Marianne , when she was nineteen, a year before First Impressions , which became Pride and Prejudice ; she reconceived it as Sense and Sensibility when she was twenty-two, and she was thirty-six when it finally appeared. Like most first novels, it lays out what will be its author's lasting preoccupations: the "three or four families in a country village" (which Austen told her niece, in an often-quoted letter, was "the very thing to work on"). The interlocking anxieties over marriages, estates, and ecclesiastical "livings." The secrets, deceptions, and self-deceptions that take several hundred pages to straighten out-to the extent...
