About this edition

A source edition of Jane Austen's complete surviving US-public-domain corpus in the original English, arranged by composition. The text is public-domain source text drawn from a verified archive of Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Wikisource witnesses; Hermitsh Press adds the reading and reference apparatus the raw files do not have.

This is the complete public-domain English text in the language it was written — not a translation. What Hermitsh Press adds is the editorial apparatus around it: the glossary, cross-references, and notes.

What's here

The six novels stand at their composition dates: Northanger Abbey (finished 1803 as 'Susan', published 1817), Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (finished 1816) — with Lady Susan (c. 1794), the complete epistolary novella first printed in 1871. The fragments are The Watsons (c. 1804) in its pure 1871 text without either later completion, the chapter of Persuasion Austen cancelled in July 1816, and Sanditon, the twelve chapters of January-March 1817 first printed in 1925. From the juvenilia come the five pieces of Volume the Second — Love and Freindship, The History of England, Lesley Castle, A Collection of Letters, and Scraps — in the 1922 first printing, and The Mystery, the one Volume the First piece printed in the 1871 Memoir. The documents are the Plan of a Novel and Austen's own Opinions of Mansfield Park and Opinions of Emma, from Chapman's 1926 first edition. The letters are the ninety-four of the Brabourne edition (1884); the verse runs from the three charades of the 1895 family booklet to the elegy for Mrs. Lefroy (1808), the light verse of the Memoir, the 1807 rose-game and Popham lines, and Venta, the Winchester-races stanzas of 15 July 1817. Not yet here, because not yet US public domain: the letters first published in Chapman's 1932 edition (expected 2028), the Volume the First notebook (1933 first printing; expected 2029), the three prayers (1940 first printing), Volume the Third with 'Evelyn' and 'Catharine' (1951), the poems first printed in Minor Works (1954), and the disputed playlet 'Sir Charles Grandison' (1980). Each joins the edition when its date arrives.

The original English

These pages present Jane Austen's words in the English they were written in, drawn from open scholarly sources. The text is reproduced unaltered — this edition is the original, not one of our translations. Only the glossary, cross-references, and notes are Hermitsh Press's editorial apparatus.

How to use this

Read any work straight through, or follow the glossary and cross-reference links to trace a name or place across the whole corpus. Every section is individually linkable, so any passage can be cited and shared.

Citation and reuse

The English text is in the public domain. The headnotes, glossary, and editorial apparatus are released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — share and adapt with attribution, non-commercial use only.

Status

25 works in this original-language edition.