Jane Austen: Complete Works + Extras – 83 titles

Jane Austen, Complete Works Plus Extras is a comprehensive ebook collection bringing together all six of Jane Austen’s completed novels along with her juvenile writings, unfinished novels, letters, and various pieces of biographical and critical material relating to her life and work. The collection runs to several dozen separate items and provides essentially everything an Austen reader could want in a single edition.

The six major novels are at the heart of the collection. Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, follows the contrasting fortunes of the Dashwood sisters Elinor and Marianne after their father’s death leaves them suddenly poor. Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, is the most famous of Austen’s novels, with Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy in the romance that has become one of the central love stories of English fiction. Mansfield Park, published in 1814, follows the quiet heroine Fanny Price in the great house of her wealthy relatives. Emma, published in 1815, is the comic masterpiece in which Emma Woodhouse meddles in everyone’s affairs without recognising her own. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1817, complete the major sequence.

The juvenile writings include the spirited short fictions that Austen produced in her teens, with Love and Freindship and The History of England being particularly enjoyable. The fragments include Lady Susan, an unusual epistolary novella about a manipulative widow, and the unfinished Sanditon and The Watsons. The letters give the personal voice of a writer who was the daily intelligent observer of her own English country society and whose private correspondence is often as sharp as her published fiction.

The complete collection runs to several thousand pages of primary text. It is best worked through in the order Austen herself would have recommended, starting with one of the lighter novels like Pride and Prejudice or Emma before approaching the more serious Mansfield Park and Persuasion. For Austen readers who already love the novels, the juvenile pieces and the letters extend the pleasure considerably. It pairs naturally with the various biographical and critical studies of Austen, particularly those by Park Honan and Claire Tomalin.