Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are two very different sisters. Marianne loves excitement and always shows her feelings; Elinor is quiet and has more good sense. They both fall in love and both suffer broken hearts. Will they ever find the right man to love and marry?

At nineteen Anne Elliot refuses an offer of marriage from Frederick Wentworth, persuaded to do so by Lady Russell, a friend of her dead mother. Wentworth is a sailor, with no money and an uncertain future, says Lady Russell — just a nobody, certainly not worthy of a baronet's daughter. Eight years later Wentworth returns, a rich and successful captain, looking for a wife. Anne is still unmarried, but Captain Wentworth clearly prefers the company of the two Musgrove girls...

Sometimes the Dashwood girls do not seem like sisters. Elinor is all calmness and reason, and can be relied upon for practical, common sense opinions. Marianne, on the other hand, is all sensibility, full of passionate and romantic feeling. She has no time for dull common sense — or for middle-aged men of thirty-five, long past the age of marriage. True love can only be felt by the young, of course. And if your heart is broken at the age of seventeen, how can you ever expect to recover from the passionate misery that fills your life, waking and sleeping?

One of Jane Austen's finest works. Emma is the story of a wealthy and beautiful girl whose favourite hobby is matchmaking. But when she tries to bring her friend Harriet together with Mr Elton, a young widower, the results are disastrous. Emma is the amusing and wonderful story of a young woman's journey towards self-knowledge and true love.

«'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older — the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.' Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with neither fortune, ancestry, nor prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances. «Persuasion» celebrates romantic constancy in an era of turbulent change. Written as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, the novel examines how a woman can at once remain faithful to her past and still move forward into the future.»

Jane and Elizabeth Bennet are the oldest of five sisters in need of husbands, but it isn’t easy to find the right man. Are Mr Bingley, Mr Darcy and Mr Wickham all that they seem? Will pride and prejudice ever be defeated in the search for true love?

Emma Woodhouse is beautiful, clever and rich. She likes to arrange marriages between her friends and neighbours in the village of Highbury. But Emma makes a lot of mistakes and causes more problems than happy marriages. Then she almost loses her own chance of love.

«'his perfect indifference, and your pointed dislike, make it so delightfully absurd!' «Pride and Prejudice» has delighted generations of readers with its unforgettable cast of characters, carefully choreographed plot, and a hugely entertaining view of the world and its absurdities. With the arrival of eligible young men in their neighbourhood, the lives of Mr and Mrs Bennet and their five daughters are turned inside out and menide down. Pride encounters prejudice, upward-mobility confronts social disdain, and quick-wittedness challenges sagacity, as misconceptions and hasty judgements lead to heartache and scandal, but eventually to true understanding, self-knowledge, and love. In this supremely satisfying story, Jane Austen balances comedy with seriousness, and witty observation with profound insight. If Elizabeth Bennet returns again and again to her letter from Mr Darcy, readers»

In 1806, Captain Frederick Wentworth and Miss Anne Elliot fell in love, but since neither of them had any money, Anne’s friend Lady Russell persuaded Anne not to marry the Captain. Eight years later, Anne and Frederick meet again. By this time Frederick has made a fortune in the Navy, but he is still angry with Anne for rejecting him. This – the last of Jane Austen’s novels – is also the most delicate and moving love story she ever wrote.

Dashwood, sensible and sensitive, and her romantic, impetuous younger sister Marianne, the prospect of marrying the men they love appears remote. In a world ruled by money and self-interest, the Dashwood sisters have neither fortune nor connections. Concerned for others and for social proprieties, Elinor is ill-equipped to compete with self-centred fortune-hunters like Lucy Steele, whilst Marianne's unswerving belief in the truth of her own feelings makes her more dangerously susceptible to the designs of unscrupulous men. Through her heroines' parallel experiences of love, loss, and hope, Jane Austen offers a powerful analysis of the ways in which women's lives were shaped by the claustrophobic society in which they had to Top page survive.

Jane Austen's witty novel is set in the early 1800s. It is a light-hearted account of the difficulties a pretty young woman encounters in her search for a rich and handsome husband!

Catherine Morland is going on her first visit to the city of Bath. She is seventeen and comes from a small, quiet town in the English countryside. She likes Gothic novels. When she makes friends with the handsome young Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, she will find herself in the middle of a family tragedy. Henry’s home, Northanger Abbey, is the scene of a crime. Or is it all just a product of Catherine’s imagination?

At the age of ten, shy, vulnerable Fanny Price leaves behind her impoverished family in Portsmouth to go and live with her rich relatives at Mansfield Park. Growing up with her cousins Tom, Edmund, Maria and Julia, she is aware that she is different from them and that her place in society cannot be taken for granted, although she is not treated unkindly. A dashing couple from London, Mary Crawford and her brother Henry, enter this stable, rural world. They succeed in dazzling everyone at Mansfield Park, except for Fanny, who sees through their shallow veneer. Throughout the dramatic events that follow it is she who is able to bring back some stability to the ruptured lives of those around her. One of the great novels of the nineteenth century, Mansfield Park echoes Jane Austen's fears and awareness of the dawn of a modern age, which was to bring about a complete break from the old country traditions and way of life.

«Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published. Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in «Northanger Abbey»; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in «Mansfield Park»; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in «Sense and Sensibility»; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in «Persuasion» succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; and Emma — 'a heroine whom no one but myself will like' teased Austen — yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight.Indeed not unlike her renowned creator, Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society's whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose.»

Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published. Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions in Mansfield Park; her delightfully paced comedy of manners and the machinations of the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility; the quiet strength of Anne Elliot in Persuasion succeeding in a world designed to subjugate her very existence; and Emma — 'a heroine whom no one but myself will like' teased Austen — yet another irresistible character on fire with imagination and foresight. Indeed not unlike her renowned creator. Jane Austen is as sure-footed in her steps through society's whirlpools of convention and prosaic mores as she is in her sometimes restrained but ever precise and enduring prose.

When Mr Bingley comes to live at Netherfield bringing his friend Mr Darcy with him, Mrs Bennet is delighted; she has five daughters to be married. However, things don’t go as smoothly as she hoped: Mr Bingley abandons Jane, Mr Darcy clearly has no interest in Elizabeth and she refuses Mr Collins’ proposal of marriage.

Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim — that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. In this she is mocked by her cynical and indolent husband. With its wit, its social precision and, above all, its irresistible heroine, Pride and Prejudice has proved one of the most enduringly popular novels in the English language.

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her. In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine's reading becomes intertwined with her social and romantic adventures, adding to the uncertainties and embarrassments she must undergo before finding happiness.

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are sisters. Both are intelligent, sensitive, charming, and beautiful, but there the similarities end. Elinor values propriety and common sense; she is prudent and cautious with a strong sense of duty. Marianne, by contrast, has extravagant Romantic ideas; she is excessive and spontaneous. Both sisters fall in love early in the story, but both love stories are problematic. In this brilliant novel, Jane Austen explores two different ways of thinking and acting – the 'sense' of Elinor and the 'sensibility' of Marianne – as they try to find happiness in a world full of hypocrisy, vulgarity, and self-interest.