JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS

London: J.M. Dent and Company, 1894. About fine.. Fresh and beautiful late Victorian set from one of the most celebrated and widely read writers in English. Austen combines a profound artistic confidence with entertaining popular love stories. Audiences have been buoyed along for centuries by Austen's subtly bold and witty authorial voice, her novels burrowing into our collective literary consciousness. This set includes introductory notes by R. Brimley Johnson, a Cambridge professor specializing in 19th-century novels. He is best known in Austen studies for his important edition of THE LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN (published the same year as this set), which Deirdre Le Faye considers the first "selected edition [...] expressly designed to reveal character and personality, as apart from the writer's genius" (Le Faye, xi). An uncommonly charming set, in exceptional condition, preserved in an early custom-made cloth box. Ten volumes, 6.75'' x 4.25'' each. Original tea green stamped boards with gilt title frames and facsimile of Austen's handwritten name to front board, gilt-stamped neoclassical frames to spines. Top edges gilt, other edges uncut. Full-page illustrations by William C. Cooke, ornaments by F.C. Tilney. Varying page counts, roughly 150 to 250 pages each. Housed in custom blue cloth box lined with floral patterned paper, leather title label tipped onto lid. Box gently worn. Offsetting and light foxing to endpapers, a couple volumes with slightest toning or lean to spines. Unusually fresh and lovely.