Jane Austen’s novels are timeless. Harvard Press Annotated versions of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion make great gifts
Rating: 4 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I am, and have been since I first encountered Martin Gardner’s wonderful The Annotated Alice many years ago, a great fan of the genre of annotated editions,” says Harvard University Press is executive editor John Kulka. “Few people would dispute the claim that Austen is among the world’s most beloved authors. I’ve long thought that her novels deserved the full Martin Gardner treatment, replete with running commentary, essays, and lots of color illustrations.”
Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1813,was Austen’s most popular novel during her lifetime. It was also her favorite. This version of Pride and Prejudice has gorgeous illustrations and is annotated by scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks who explains the literary and historical contexts, allusions, and outdated language that can be a bit confusing. Spacks helps the reader delve deeper into the story and characters.
Persuasion was originally published in 1817, after Austen’s death. Persuasion is quite introspective and more passionate that other Austen novels. The introduction for Persuasion is by scholar Robert Morrison. His notes are about the relationship between Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth. He also covers Austen contemporaries such as Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Maria Edgeworth.
Both books would make fantastic gifts for anyone who loves Jane Austen. The books are designed to be read, reread, cherished and passed on to the next generation of Austen lovers.
“Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion are so extravagantly beautiful that one reviewer has seen fit to call them anti-Kindles, anti-Nooks, and anti-tablets,” says Kulka. “I knew the volumes had to be physically beautiful objects…books that readers, especially those readers who think of themselves as friends of Jane, would want to own and treasure as part of their permanent libraries.”
“The running commentary is all there in the margins of the book, to be consulted or ignored, depending on your mood,” says Kulka. “There’s something very appealing about the idea of an expert…someone smarter, more educated, and wiser than yourself acting as a guide to a work of literature. And of course, there are all of those gorgeous illustrations, drawings, and maps.”
Kulka did research for the color illustrations in Pride and Prejudice. That research took him to the Yale British Art Museum, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Houghton Library at Harvard. “At the Houghton, I got to handle and page through a copy of the first edition of Pride and Prejudice, originally published in a three volume format, as all novels were then, to accommodate the circulating libraries, which functioned somewhat like Blockbuster or Netflix, except of course the circulating libraries rented out books not movies. The copy of the first edition at the Houghton was owned by the poet and avid book collector Amy Lowell. The first of the three volumes contains her book plate.”
“I viewed first editions of Austen’s work and many Regency era publications,” says Kulka. “Sadly, very little of Austen’s work survives in manuscript form. There are two canceled chapters from Persuasion that survive, but nothing more from that late novel, nor indeed anything else from her major novels.”
Next year Harvard University Press will publish Emma: An Annotated Edition, the next installment in the Austen series. “I just finished reading the final manuscript,” says Kulka. “A very good British scholar named Bharat Tandon has put that volume together for me.”
Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition . Author Jane Austen, Editor Patricia Meyer Spacks. Hardcover, 464 pages, Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Annotated edition (October 1, 2010), Language: English, ISBN: 9780674049161 $35.00
Persuasion: An Annotated Edition. Author Jane Austen, Editor Robert Morrison. Hardcover: 360 pages, Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Annotated edition (November 7, 2011), Language: English, ISBN: 9780674049741 $35.00
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