Information about the author

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ph.D., is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her publications include An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope, The Female Imagination, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels, and Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind.