Jane Austen - Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics)

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Begun in 1814, Emma was first published in 1816.

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright 2004 by Steven Marcus.

Note on Jane Austen, The World of Jane Austen and Emma, Notes,

Inspired by Emma, Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading

Copyright 2004 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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Emma

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-152-2 ISBN-10: 1-59308-152-9

eISBN : 978-1-411-43210-9

LC Control Number 2004102194

Produced and Published in conjunction with:

Fine Creative Media, Inc.

322 Eighth Avenue

New York, NY 10001

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

Printed in the United States of America

QM

7 9 10 8 6

Jane Austen

The English novelist Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, the seventh of eight children, in the Parsonage House of Steventon, Hampshire, where she spent her first twenty-five years. During her relatively brief lifetime Austen witnessed political unrest, revolution, war, and industrialization, yet these momentous events are not the central or explicit subjects of her finely focused novels. Rather, Austen wrote out of her immediate experience: the world of the country gentry and middle-class professional and business families. Janes father, the Reverend George Austen, was the well-read country rector of Steventon, and her mother, Cassandra (ne Leigh), was descended from a well-connected line of learned clergymen. By no means wealthy, the Austens nonetheless enjoyed a comfortable and socially respectable life.

Jane and her beloved elder (and only) sister, Cassandra, were schooled in Southampton and Reading for short periods, but most of their education took place at home. Private theatrical performances in the barn at Steventon complemented Janes studies of French, Italian, history, music, and eighteenth-century fiction. An avid reader from earliest childhood, she began writing at age twelve, no doubt encouraged by her highly literate and affectionate family. Indeed, family and writing were her great loves. Despite a momentary engagement in 1802, Jane Austen never married. Her first two extended narratives, Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions, were written while she was at Steventon but were never published in their original form.

Following her fathers retirement, Jane moved in 1801 with her parents and sister to Bath. That popular watering hole, removed from the country life Jane preferred, presented the observant young writer with a wealth of events and experiences that would later be put to good use in her novels. Austen moved to Southampton with her mother and sister after the death of her father in 1805. Several years later the three women settled in Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, where Austen resided until the end of her life. She welcomed her return to the countryside and, with it, there came a renewed artistic vigor that led to the revision of her early novels. Sense and Sensibility, a reworking of Elinor and Marianne, was published in 1811, followed by Pride and Prejudice, a reworking of First Impressions, two years later.

Austen completed three more novels (Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion) in the Chawton sitting room. Productive and discreet, she was not widely known to be the author of her published work. All of her novels were published anonymously, including the posthumous appearance, thanks to her brother Henry, of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

The last years of Austens life were relatively quiet and comfortable. Her final, unfinished work, Sanditon, was put aside in the spring of 1817, when her health sharply declined and she was taken to Winchester for medical treatment of what appears to have been Addisons disease or a form of lymphoma. Jane Austen died there on July 18, 1817, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

The World of Jane Austen and Emma