The award-winning series of Jane Austen novels on Naxos Audiobooks - in distinctive productions with music of the period - are now available collected into two boxed sets. This set, volume 1, includes Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and The Biography

Emma

1996 Talkies Award • Best Abridgement
Read by Juliet Stevenson, 1996 Talkies “Reader of the Year” Award-Winner

Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen's most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is 'handsome, clever and rich' and has 'a disposition to think too well of herself'. When she decides to introduce the humble Harriet Smith to the delights of genteel society and to find her a suitable husband, she precipitates herself and her immediate circle into a web of misunderstanding and intrigue, from which no-one emerges unchanged.

Music: Beethoven, Cramer, Purvis

Mansfield Park

At the tender age of ten, Fanny Price is 'adopted' by her rich relations and is removed from the povorty of her home in Portsmouth to the opulence of Mansfield Park. The transplantation is not a happy one. Dependent, neglected and forgotten, Fanny struggles to come to terms with her new life until, tested almost to the limits of endurance, she assumes her rightful role...

Music: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Weber

Northanger Abbey

When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman's daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the fashionable high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Captivated and disconcerted by what she finds, and introduced to the joys of "Gothic novels" by her new friend, Isabella, Catherine longs for mystery and romance. When she is invited to stay with the beguiling Henry Tilney and his family at Northanger Abbey, she expects mystery and intrigue at every turn. However, the truth turns out to be even stranger than fiction...

Music: Beethoven, Mozart

The Biography

Who was the person behind Emma, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and the other unforgettable novels of Regency England? She comes alive in this perceptive biography - the classic account by Elizabeth Jenkins - showing the writer to be a human being with all her own interests, hopes and foibles.

The classic biography for people to find out more about the writer herself.

Music: Haydn piano music