The Boxset Include these Titles 1.) Persuasion ‘She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older’  At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. In her introduction, Gillian Beer discusses Austen’s portrayal of the double-edged nature of persuasion and the clash between old and new worlds. This edition also includes a new chronology and full textual notes. 2.) Pride And Prejudice Mr and Mrs Bennet live with their five daughters. Jane, the eldest daughter, falls in love with Charles Bingley, a rich batchelor who takes a house nearby with his two sisters and friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy. Darcy is attracted to the second daugher, Elizabeth, but a bad account of him is given to Elizabeth. He and Bingley's effect the separation of Bingley and Jane. William Collins, cousin to the sisters and as only male, heir to the Bennet estate, proposes to Elizabeth but is rejected. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth but she refuses. When Elizabeth travels north she is invited with friends to Darcy's place in Berbyshire, and thinking Darcy is absent she goes. However, he is there and she is surprised by his much-improved manners. She hears news that her sister Lydia has eloped with Wickham, an unprincipled adventurer. With Darcy's help the fugitives are found. The attachment between Bingley and Jane is renewed and leads to an engagement. In spite of the insolent intervention of Lady Catherine, Darcy and Elizabeth become engaged. 3.) Sense and Sensibility ‘The more I know of the world the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!’ Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willougby she ignores her sister Elinor’s warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love – and its threatened loss – the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love. This edition also includes explanatory notes, textual variants between first and second edition, and Tony Tanner’s introduction to the original Penguin Classic edition. 4.) Mansfield Park At the age of ten, shy, vulnerable Fanny Price leaves behind her impoverished family in Portsmouth to go and live with her rich relatives at Mansfield Park. Growing up with her cousins Tom, Edmund, Maria and Julia, she is aware that she is different from them and that her place in society cannot be taken for granted, although she is not treated unkindly. A dashing couple from London, Mary Crawford and her brother Henry, enter this stable, rural world. They succeed in dazzling everyone ant Mansfield Park, except for Fanny, who sees through their shallow veneer. Throughout the dramatic events that follow it is she who is able the bring back some stability to the ruptured lives of those around her. One of the great novels of the nineteenth century, Mansfield Park echoes Jane Austen's fears and awareness of the dawn of a modern age, which was to bring about a complete break from the old country traditions and way of life. 5.) Emma Lively young socialite Emma Woodhouse likes nothing more than interfering in the romantic lives of others and when she appoints herself matchmaker to her gentle friend Harriet, she has no idea just how much chaos she will create, and soon her carefully laid plans unravel with consequences that she never expected. Might this social disorder bring about a match for Emma herself?