Celebrate English Literature With These Classic Titles

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the death of English novelist of manners Jane Austen (1775-1817), as well as the 200th anniversary of the publication of two of her most important works, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Austen, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman of modest means, chronicled the mores and machinations of the milieu of English landed gentry into which she had been born, and in whose lower rungs she spent her life. Yet despite the specificity of her subject and her geographic limitations (the farthest she likely ever traveled from her birthplace was about 100 miles), her wit and deep insight into human nature give her novels a universal, cross-cultural appeal that is as fresh today as it was two centuries ago.

This year offers a wonderful opportunity not only to explore Jane Austen's genius, but also to dig further into classic English (and Anglo-English) novels and other works that reflect the periods her work represented and, to an extent, helped usher in: the transition from Romanticism to Realism, from roughly the late Georgian through the Victorian era. Enjoy your exploration of these classics with the following sets from Perma-Bound: