Non Fiction Genres

An adapted and illustrated edition of Jane Austen's romantic classic - at an easy-to-read level for all ages.

Laura has lived a fairy-tale life until a stranger knocks on her cottage door. Then her adventures and her troubles begin. In dramatic letters, Laura tells of heartless fathers and runaway children, long-lost grandfathers and thieving cousins. Hers is a story of doomed love, fierce friendship, and the unexpected dangers of fainting.

All Catherine wants is to be like the heroines in the books she reads. On her first trip away from home, she finally gets her chance. A new friendship and a growing love lead her to the spooky Northanger Abbey. There Catherine will find that a little imagination can cause a lot of trouble.

A beautifully illustrated adapted classic that will introduce children to the works of Jane Austen.

Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emma, completing it in August 1816. She died, aged 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December that year (but dated 1818). Persuasion is linked to Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume and published together, but also because both stories are set partly in Bath, a fashionable city with which Austen was well acquainted, having lived there from 1801 to 1805. Besides the theme of persuasion, the novel evokes other topics, such as the Royal Navy, in which two of Jane Austen's brothers ultimately rose to the rank of admiral. As in Northanger Abbey, the superficial social life of Bath-well known to Austen, who spent several relatively unhappy and unproductive years there-is portrayed extensively and serves as a setting for the second half of the book. In many respects Persuasion marks a break with Austen's previous works, both in the more biting, even irritable satire directed at some of the novel's characters and in the regretful, resigned outlook of its otherwise admirable heroine, Anne Elliot, in the first part of the story. Against this is set the energy and appeal of the Royal Navy, which symbolises for Anne and the reader the possibility of a more outgoing, engaged, and fulfilling life, and it is this worldview which triumphs for the most part at the end of the novel.

Clever and confident, Emma is positive that she can find the perfect husband for her new friend Harriet. But with one mistake after another, Emma realises that she might not understand people as well as she thought. In fact, she might not even understand her own heart.About The Complete Jane Austen Simplified A simplification of Jane Austen's classic stories, illustrated and includes free audio QR codes