Edited by David Widger

DEDICATION

This Jane Austen collection is dedicated to Alice Goodson [Hart] Woodby

CONTENTS:

  PERSUASION

NORTHANGER ABBEY

  MANSFIELD PARK

  EMMA

  LADY SUSAN

  LOVE AND FREINDSHIP AND OTHER EARLY WORKS

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

PERSUASION

by Jane Austen

(1818)

Chapter 1

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: