Brush Up on Your Jane Austen: Brief essays on the Austen family, style and technique in Jane Austen novels

Jane Austen lived between bookends made up of famous names; she was born a few years later than the Romantic poets William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834), and novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832), and died when the poets Byron, Shelley, and Keats were already famous. It was a time of change in Europe, America, and all over the world since the British empire had possessions everywhere-the sun never set on the British empire. As we read in Jane Austen's biographies, she had never stepped into worlds of wild passion, yet we find in her fiction great heights and depths of the human condition. This renders null the often-heard aphorism one should only write about what one knows and has experienced. Her world may have been narrow and bounded, but her imagination was wide and boundless where she was queen of infinite space. Yet, that reduced world was teeming with the intrigue, energy, and vitality that English gentle folks would encounter in quiet villages. Like white phosphorous at the apex of its heat and light dies with a glow, so did Jane Austen, but not without leaving a legacy of six wonderfully written novels. This book contains brief essays on the Austen family, style and technique in Jane Austen's six completed novels: Persuasion, North Anger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Sense and Sensibility.