There have been innumerable reinterpretations of her work but no revaluations. Brian Southam shows how different readers and critics have reacted to her work - from perceptive and appreciative review of Emma by her contemporary Sir Walter Scott, to the admiration of D. H. Lawrence, who nonetheless assessed her as 'a narrow-gutted spinster.' Mr Southam considers how Jane Austen invented her own special mode of fiction, limited and highly selective, using as her material the quiet everyday domestic life of middle-class country families in Regency England, and how behind the wit and irony lay an awareness of the problems of social existence, in particular the women's predicament in striving for self-determination and identity in a world of convention ruled by men.

Brian Southam, formerly a lecturer in English at the University of London, and Editorial Director of Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd; he has written and edited books on Jane Austen, Tennyson and T. S. Eliot, and articles on many other authors, including Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Keats and Yeats.