Lady Susan - The Watsons

Título: Lady Susan / The Watsons
Autor: Jane Austen
Editorial: Del Fondo
N° de págs.: 194
Idioma: Inglés
ISBN: 9789878304236

Comentario sobre el libro
Lady Susan
Comprising one finished novel, Lady Susan, which was published posthumously, and two unfinished fragments, Sanditon and The Watsons, this collection full of melodrama and burlesque, and exploring a range of literary styles and social classes –spans the entirety of Jane Austen'’s writing life.

The epistolary novel Lady Susan is the darkly humorous tale of the amatory schemes and machinations of an ambitious and unprincipled coquette. The Watsons is the tale of the refined and well-educated Emma Watson, forced by the second marriage of her aunt to return to the house of her impecunious father and face the marital plots and intrigues of her sisters. Begun in the last few months of Jane Austen'’s life, Sanditon, set in a fast-growing former fishing village, swiftly becoming a fashionable resort, pokes fun at the inhabitants of the new coastal town, with all their hypochondria, witlessness and self-obsession.

The Watsons
The Watsons is an unfinished novel by Jane Austen. She began writing it c. 1803 and probably abandoned it after her father's death in January 1805. It has five chapters, and is less than 18,000 words long.

This fragment of a novel was written by Jane Austen in 1804 and remained untitled and unpublished until her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh printed it in his A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1871. The title is from him.

Mr Watson is a widowed clergyman with two sons and four daughters. The youngest daughter, Emma, has been brought up by a wealthy aunt and is consequently better educated and more refined than her sisters. But when her aunt contracts a foolish second marriage, Emma is obliged to return to her father'’s house. There she is chagrined by the crude and reckless husband-hunting of two of her twenty-something sisters.

Referencias del autor

Escritora inglesa nacida en Steventon el 16 de diciembre de 1775, Jane Austen es considerada una de las autoras más influyentes dentro de la literatura anglosajona.

De inicio precoz, escribió varias obras de niña que serían compiladas años después de su muerte. Fue Sentido y sensibilidad (1811) su primera obra publicada y con la que consiguió cierto nombre dentro del mundo literario. Dos años más tarde publicaría Orgullo y prejuicio (1813), que se convertiría en un gran éxito y, posiblemente, en su obra más conocida.

De un estilo innovador en su épica, la novela romántica de Austen, cargada de tintes costumbristas, gozó de gran popularidad en su época y logró influir de manera notable a generaciones posteriores de escritores ingleses.

Sus últimas novelas, Persuasión y La abadía de Northanger, una parodia de la incipiente novela gótica, fueron publicadas juntas en 1817, de manera póstuma.

Varias de las obras de Austen han sido adaptadas al cine y a la televisión, destacando las versiones de Sentido y sensibilidad (dirigida por Ang Lee) y la serie de televisión de la BBC dedicada a Orgullo y prejuicio.

Jane Austen murió el 18 de julio de 1817 en la localidad inglesa de Winchester.