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to the publisher of the first edition and was not involved with the preparation of the two further editions in her life-time; Emma did not reach a second edition in Britain in Austen’s lifetime; and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously. Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, however, both appeared in second editions in which Austen took some part. Hitherto all reprints of these novels have been based on the second editions. The Penguin Edition returns to the first-edition texts of both novels, and includes a list of the substantive variants between the two editions so that readers can see clearly for the first time the alterations made between the first and second editions.

The editors have worked from copies of the first editions kindly supplied by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The editorial policy is one of minimum intervention: no attempt has been made to modernize spelling or punctuation, or to render spellings consistent so long as the variant spellings were acceptable in the period. Where any of these might cause difficulty to the modern reader the editor has offered help and explanation in a note.

The editors have emended the text in the following circumstances: errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected. Where, after all allowance has been made for historical usage, the text seems faulty the editors have cautiously emended it. They have been assisted by the fact that there is a tradition of Austen scholarship. The first edition of Austen’s novels to examine the texts thoroughly was The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R. W. Chapman, 5 vols (Clarendon, 1923). This pioneering edition was itself revised in later reprints, and all recent editions have been either based on Chapman’s text or acknowledge debts to it. The editors of the Penguin Edition have edited Austen’s texts anew from the first editions, but in making decisions about obscurities and cruxes they have borne in mind the work of previous commentators on the Austen texts. The greatest of these is R. W. Chapman, but there have been others, including critics and general readers who have from time to time queried passages in Austen’s texts and suggested emendations. Where the Penguin editors are indebted to a previous scholar for a particular emendation they acknowledge it, and where a crux has provoked controversy they indicate it in a brief note. All corrections to the text other than any which are purely typographical are recorded in the ‘Emendations to the Text’.

Austen’s novels originally appeared in three volumes (with the exception of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which appeared together in four volumes). To make the original volume arrangements visible in a one-volume format the Penguin Edition has headlines at the top of each page so that in any opening the headline on the left will give the volume and chapter number in the first edition and the headline on the right will give the chapter number in a continuously numbered sequence.

The bibliographical basis of the Penguin Edition is David Gilson’s Bibliography of Jane Austen (Clarendon, 1982), to which the edition is happy to acknowledge its debt.

Claire Lamont

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Textual Adviser

Chronology

1775 Jane Austen born on 16 December, the second daughter and seventh child of the Revd George Austen and his wife, Cassandra Leigh. Her father was rector of the village of Steventon in Hampshire. The family was well-connected although not rich. Two of her brothers entered the navy and rose to the rank of Rear-Admiral.

1776 American Declaration of Independence.

1778 Frances Burney published Evelina.

1785–6 Austen, with her sister Cassandra, attended the Abbey School, Reading.

1787 Austen started to write the short, parodic pieces of fiction known as her Juvenilia.

1789 French Revolution broke out.

1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

1793 Britain at war with revolutionary France.

1794 Ann Radcliffe published The Mysteries of Udolpho.

1795 Austen wrote ‘Elinor and Marianne’, a first