The Connell Guide To Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice by Janet Todd

The Connell Guide To Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice by Janet Todd

Despite the astringency of her writing, Austen is often thought of as the mother of romance. She has made the Regency period (1811-1820) almost synonymous with modern popular notions of the romantic. Directly or indirectly, she has influenced romantic novels by authors such as Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier and supermarket fodder of the sort published by Mills and Boon. Of all her books, though, it is Pride and Prejudice which comes closest to delivering the fairytale story of the ordinary girl who catches and marries a prince. As Janet Todd shows in this entertaining guide, however, it is not just the most inventive and ebullient of her works, but also the one which closes with the heroine most in the ascendancy and least controlled by either parent or husband. Here, for the only time in Austen's novels, the romantic dream of bourgeois individualism taming aristocratic authority actually does come true. But if, on one level, Pride and Prejudice is a reworking of the Cinderella story, it is a fiction of much greater depth than Austen's ironic, self-deprecating description of it as rather too light & bright & sparkling would suggest. Beneath the light, bright and sparkling surface, says Edward Neill, it investigates the social heart of darkness. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen explores not just what it is like to be a girl in search of a suitable husband, but what it is to be human, brilliantly illuminating the difficulties of the individual living within society and the necessity constantly to reconcile personal needs with those of the wider world around one.

Janet Todd is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England's first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton.

Janet Todd is the general editor of the 9-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen and editor ofJane Austen in Context and the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works areWomen's Friendship in Literature, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 and theCambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils. Lady Susan Plays the Game is her first foray into fiction.

In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women's writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal Women's Writing. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781907776021
ISBN 10	1907776028
Title	The Connell Guide To Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
Author	Janet Todd
Series	The Connell Guide To
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD
Year published	2012-06-15
Number of pages	128
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable