The text is that of the 1813 first edition, accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations. This Norton Critical Edition also includes: Biographical portraits of Austen by members of her family and, new to the Fourth Edition, those by Jon Spence (Becoming Jane Austen) and Paula Byrne (The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things). Fourteen critical essays, eleven of them new to the Fourth Edition, reflecting the finest current scholarship. Contributors include Janet Todd, Andrew Elfenbein, Felicia Bonaparte, and Tiffany Potter, among others. “Writers on Austen”—a new section of brief comments by Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and others. A Chronology and revised and expanded Selected Bibliography.

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Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, in England. Her father, an Anglican clergyman, encouraged her literary pursuits from a young age and by her mid-twenties, Austen had drafted three novels. Following the success of Sense and Sensibility in 1811, she went on to publish Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1818. Despite her fondness for marriage plotsall six of her novels end in weddingsAusten never married, living with her mother and sister in the years leading up to her death. She died on July 18, 1817, in the city of Winchester. Over two centuries later, Austen's novels remain beloved classics, and she is considered one of the foremost writers in English literary history.Mary A. Favret is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime and Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters and co-editor, with Nicola J. Watson, of At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist and Materialist Criticism.Donald J. Gray is Professor Emeritus and Culbertson Chair Emeritus of English at Indiana University. He is the coeditor of the fourth Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice and of the anthology Victorian Poetry and Prose and has written on Victorian poetry and fiction, popular journalism, and the history of literary publishing.