EMMA

Jane Austen began to write Emma in January of 1814 and finished it a little over a year later, in March of 1815. At the time of completion, Austen was thirty-nine years old. Emma was published at the end of 1815, with 2,000 copies being printed563, more than a quarter, were still unsold after four years. She earned less than forty pounds from the book during her lifetime, though it earned more after her death. Austen died a year and a half after publication. [Source: The Cambridge Companion To Jane Austen, Edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997.]Emma was Austen's fourth published novel, and the last to appear before her death. Both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey would be published posthumously. Though she published anonymously, her previous works were noticed by critics and literature lovers. One of her admirers was H.R.H. The Prince Regent. Through the prince's librarian, Austen was invited to dedicate one of her works to the prince, she complied to the royal command in the dedication of Emmathough her reluctance to do so is apparent in the wording of the dedication.For more information on Emma: Emma Links

The enormous popularity of Jane Austen's novels has led to many movie and television adaptions of her novels, beginning with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson in the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, continuing to the nearly legendary wet shirt of Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC mini-series, and now including Bollywood musicals and zombies. In recent years, there has been an explosion of popular novels based on Jane Austen and her works.Austen.com hosts a collection of resources about the great British writer Jane Austen (1775-1817). Her novels center on the lives of young women in middle class Regency England, and every novel ends with a happy marriage or two. But don't expect simple love stories in all of Jane Austen's works. As an unmarried woman of very modest financial means, Jane Austen understood the hopes and fears of women who had to rely on marriage and family connections to provide them with a home and means to live. Miss Austen was fortunate in having the support of her family and a successful literary career, but she knew how easy it would be to become a tedious Miss Bates, a pitiable Jane Fairfax, or a sickly and forgotten Mrs Smith.With the departure of Dwiggie, a wonderful repository of fan fiction, we are now looking for new content producers who would like to help maintain this site. We had 10 terrific years with the Dwiggies but they decided to move on and now we need to breathe some fresh air in to Austen.com. We're seeking an individual or group who loves Jane Austen who would like to volunteer to maintain and grow this site for a share of the revenues. We are also the host of firth.com, a fan site for the award winning actor who has played the role of Darcy in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Austen.com hosts the texts of Jane Austen's novels and lists of other resources on Jane Austen, her works, and Regency England. We also host the popular and useful Basic HTML Tag Tutorial.

Chapter descriptions are designed to be very vague and cryptic. They are for people who are familiar with the book to help them find the chapter they want, and they are not designed for the student who might be looking for a quick way to get out of reading the novel.The chapter list below has two different sets of chapter numbers. The Roman numerals reflect the fact that the novel was originally published in three volumes, with each volume starting with chapter 1. The second set, in parentheses, represents a start-to-finish numbering of the chapters.The Dedication

In this video from the British Library (5:19), Professor Kathryn Sutherland discusses the ground-breaking nature of Austen's use of social realism and her focus on the mundanity of everyday life. Video also available at YouTube, here. - See more at: http://www.webenglishteacher.com/austen.html#sthash.FFYgH9O5.dpuf