"Ross has read the fiction and the surviving correspondence scrupulously and the result is, as its title promises, a lively companion to Austen's life and work and a pleasurable experience for those who have just come across the books and wish to widen their knowledge of the writer and her background."-The Sunday Times, London

The only best-selling authors in Jane Austen's league in the English language today are Shakespeare and Dickens. In the twenty-first century her boundless appeal continues to grow following the enormously successful TV and film adaptations of Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, and of course, Sense and Sensibility.

This illuminating, entertaining, up-to-date companion is the only general guide to Jane Austen, her work, and her world. Josephine Ross explores the literary scene during the time Austen's works first appeared: the books considered classics then, the "horrid novels" and romances, and the grasping publishers. She looks at the architecture and décor of Austen's era that made up "the profusion and elegance of modern taste": Regency houses for instance, Chippendale furniture, "picturesque scenery." On the smaller scale she answers questions that may baffle modern readers of Austen's work. What, for example, was "hartshorn"? How did Lizzy Bennet "let down" her gown to hide her muddy petticoat? Ross shows us the fashions, and the subtle ways Jane Austen used clothes to express character. Courtship, marriage, adultery, class and "rank," mundane tasks of ordinary life, all appear, as does the wider political and military world-especially the navy, in which her brothers served.

This book will add depth to all readers' enjoyment of Jane Austen, whether confirmed addicts or newcomers wanting to know what all the fuss is about.

Josephine Ross has written books on the British monarchy, history, and on style, including The Monarchy in Britain. She has also worked for Vogue magazine and in television. She is married to the historian James Chambers and lives in London.

"She certainly disliked any impropriety in other's writings. In 1807 she had returned Mme. de Genlis's popular novel Alphonsine to the lending library, declaring, 'We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure.'"

"Her own physical experience with the opposite sex, however, was almost certainly slight. Apart from the kiss which Charles Powlett, a Hampshire neighbor, had apparently wanted to give her, there was an incident in 1801 when she found herself alone in a drawing room with a notorious local lecher: 'Nothing could prevail on me to move two steps from the door, on the lock of which I kept one hand constantly fixed,' she assured Cassandra, with mock theatricality. But even with a man whose attentions she welcomed, modesty, and the need to preserve her reputation, would have ruled out almost any intimacy."