“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”

The Book Fairies have been busy sharing Austen books from the new Wordsworth Classics collection around the UK today! How beautiful are these new covers?! The colourful foil lettering is stunning!

About Pride and Prejudice:

Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim – that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. In this she is mocked by her cynical and indolent husband.

With its wit, its social precision and, above all, its irresistible heroine, Pride and Prejudice has proved one of the most enduringly popular novels in the English language. Introduction and Notes by Dr Ian Littlewood, University of Sussex.

About Northanger Abbey:

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her.

In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine’s reading becomes intertwined with her social and romantic adventures, adding to the uncertainties and embarrassments she must undergo before finding happiness. Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent.

About Persuasion:

What does persuasion mean – a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen’s quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances.

A woman of no importance, she manoeuvres in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love Captain Wentworth did in the wars. Even though she is nearly thirty, well past the sell-by bloom of youth, Austen makes her win out for herself and for others like herself, in a regenerated society.

About Mansfield Park:

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.

The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her. Introduction and Notes by Dr Ian Littlewood, University of Sussex.

About Emma:

Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a ‘heroine whom no one but myself will much like’, but Emma is irresistible. ‘Handsome, clever, and rich’, Emma is also an ‘imaginist’, ‘on fire with speculation and foresight’. She sees the signs of romance all around her, but thinks she will never be married.

Her matchmaking maps out relationships that Jane Austen ironically tweaks into a clearer perspective. Judgement and imagination are matched in games the reader too can enjoy, and the end is a triumph of understanding. With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. 

About Sanditon:

In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. This collection also brings together Jane Austen’s earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817.

Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself.

About Sense and Sensibility:

Jane Austen’s sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggle of two very different sisters to achieve respectability. Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two qualities.

Elinor’s character is one of Augustan detachment, while Marianne, a fervent disciple of the Romantic Age, learns to curb her passionate nature in the interests of survival.

This book, the first of Austen’s novels to be published, remains as fresh a cautionary tale today as it ever was. Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco University.

Happy finders!

We love hearing from people who find the books fairies leave behind.. here are some of our favourites from today’s Austen activity! If you want to order any of these books, you can find them in your local bookshop, or you can see more on the Wordsworth website!

Become a book fairy!

If this activity has made YOU want to hide some books out in the wild, where you live, work and travel, then you can get started TODAY! Just grab your first set of book fairy stickers and see where the journey takes you…