First published anonymously, as ‘a lady’, Jane Austen is now among the world’s most famous and highly revered authors. The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen provides wide-ranging coverage of Jane Austen’s works, reception, and legacy, with chapters that draw on the latest literary research and theory and represent foundational and authoritative scholarship as well as new approaches to an author whose works provide seemingly endless inspiration for reinterpretation, adaptation, and appropriation. The Companion provides up-to-date work by an international team of established and emerging Austen scholars and includes exciting chapters not just on Austen in her time but on her ongoing afterlife, whether in the academy and the wider world of her fans or in cinema, new media, and the commercial world. Parts within the volume explore Jane Austen in her time and within the literary canon; the literary critical and theoretical study of her novels, unpublished writing, and her correspondence; and the afterlife of her work as exemplified in film, digital humanities, and new media. In addition, the Companion devotes special attention to teaching Jane Austen.

Jane Austen significantly shaped the development of the English novel, and her works continue to be read widely today. Though she is best known for her novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, she also wrote poems, letters, prayers and various pieces of juvenalia. These writings have been attracting the attention of scholars; her major works have already generated a large body of scholarly and critical studies. This reference is a guide to her works and the response to them. Austen's works are fraught with ambiguity. Because she was adept at displaying numerous aspects of an issue, her writings invite multiple interpretations. In light of the ambiguity of her texts, each of her major works is approached from a reader-response perspective, in which an expert contributor illuminates the reader's relationship to her writing. And because so many readers have had such varied responses to her novels, the volume also includes chapters summarizing the critical response to each of her major works. In addition, the book includes separate chapters on her poems, letters, and prayers.

Jane Austen's stock in the popular marketplace has never been higher, while academic studies continue to uncover new aspects of her engagement with her world. This fully updated edition of the acclaimed Cambridge Companion offers clear, accessible coverage of the intricacies of Austen's works in their historical context, with biographical information and suggestions for further reading. Major scholars address Austen's six novels, the letters and other works, in terms accessible to students and the many general readers, as well as to academics. With seven new essays, the Companion now covers topics that have become central to recent Austen studies, for example, gender, sociability, economics, and the increasing number of screen adaptations of the novels.

Reflecting the dynamic and expansive nature of Austen studies, A Companion to Jane Austen provides 42 essays from a distinguished team of literary scholars that examine the full breadth of the English novelist's works and career. Provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date array of Austen scholarship Functions both as a scholarly reference and as a survey of the most innovative speculative developments in the field of Austen studies Engages at length with changing contexts and cultures of reception from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries

Whether you're a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.

When Jane Austen died in 1817, she left behind 120 pages of manuscript that would eventually be published as Sanditon. Praised by some critics and condemned by others, this final effort by the great English writer has for the most part been overlooked in favor of the novels that were published during her lifetime and shortly after her death. For the first time, an entire book is devoted to examining this fragment to establish it as Jane Austen's potential masterpiece. With a new setting and a greater range of characters than found in earlier works, this novel composed during the last months of her short life, if completed, would at the same time have continued her series of magnificent novels and created new possibilities for novels to come.

Unfinished Austen examines four texts that Jane Austen left incomplete: Catharine, or the Bower (1792–-3), Lady Susan (1795?), The Watsons (1803–-4?) and Sanditon (1817), none of them published till well after her death. Since very little in manuscript form survives from the six famous novels, these four manuscript texts offer insight into the novelist in the process of creation. They also problematize the romance plot prominent in the published novels by presenting this in a nebulous or incipient state that underlines its artificiality. These texts sometimes show how the romance plot is inflected by the financial condition in which young marriageable women can find themselves. Moreover, the stories (other than Catharine) have aroused the interest of many later writers—including writers for theatre and screen—who are eager to complete or to amplify them. They may do this through developing the stories to some kind of dénouement. Perhaps more intriguingly, however, these texts induce some writers to question the very enterprise of concluding an unfinished text.