I've been a fan of Jane Austen ever since I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time (back in school and in Bulgarian). And because she was part of the standard school program in English, I got to read some of the criticism about her as well. As the years passed I started enjoying criticism a lot more - it was no more the thing that you had to read so you know what the teacher expects you to think, it became a way to look into a book from a different angle - even if you disagree with it occasionally (and as long as the critic does not ignore half of the book in order to make a point, disagreeing is just fine).

Richard Jenkyns does not concentrate only on the more popular novels - he spends a full chapter on Mansfield Park in addition to mentioning it quite often almost everywhere else and he goes on to analyze all 4 finished novels that she sees published in her life (although he does mention Persuasion and Northanger Abbey occasionally, they are there more for illustration than for anything else - he even makes a case of them not being fully Austen novels in some ways - for she might have changed them - or at least being different in dynamics and structure because of variety of reasons; in the same way he brings up some of the shorter works... to illustrate a point but not to study them). And even Sense and Sensibility is mostly used as counterpart of the other three novels (and his opinion about this novel is where I slightly disagree with him although he makes some good points).

The study of Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park allows Jenkyns to show the diversity of Austen (and this is where all other works make appearance - as most of them are different). At the same time he managed to show her compared to some of the other masters of the written word - from Dickens to Wodehouse. And it is an extensive study - into the main premise of the books (so similar and so different), into the characters building and Austen choices of them, into the concept of place in her novels (or lack of in the case of Emma). Nothing in that book is revolutionary but at the same time there are no ideas coming out of nowhere; nor he tried to show himself as cleverer than the rest of the critics (and he did cite quite a lot of them and not always in situations where he could agree with them).

I enjoyed the book a lot -- I've read all of the Austen novels, as it turned out I've read most of the books he was comparing against as well so I was not just relying on his thoughts and the passages that were cited in the book. I might disagree about some of the points in the book but that is not a reason not to recommend the book. ( )

This is a delightful book that takes you a step further into Austen's writing. ( )