ABSTRACT
About the author Jane Austen is one of the greatest, some would say the greatest of English novelists. Others find her appeal limited because she writes only about the small world in which she lived. As she said herself: 'three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on'. The families are middle class and comfortably off (although they may have interesting poor relations as we shall see) and nothing very much happens, except the occasional dance or country walk. The chief characters are young women and their main preoccupation seems to be finding husbands. If you read Jane's books you soon discover that the girls are also concerned, like many fictional heroes, with the moral philosophical questions of how one should live and whether it is possible to do the right thing and still find your heart's desire. That sounds a bit solemn, so I must qualify it at once by saying that Jane sees life as essen tially a comedy and delights in observing the absurdities of her characters and satirising their pretensions.
