Few novelists have captured the subtleties and nuances of men and women with the wit and insight of Jane Austen. Through her spirited heroines and their circle, she paints vivid portraits of English middle-class life at the end of the eighteenth century.

Each of these six novels is a love story and a story about marriage - marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not mere romances; ironic, comic and wise, they are masterly studies of the society Jane Austen observed.