Popular Catholic podcaster Haley Stewart insists that there’s no better life coach than nineteenth-century British novelist Jane Austen. In this uniquely Catholic take, Stewart reveals Austen’s thoughtful, deeply personal exploration of human relationships—including with God—through her six novels. Stewart’s insights take you on a journey that is both literary and spiritual, revealing how Austen’s characters and themes can lead to you to discover and become the person God has called you to be. Stewart draws fascinating connections between Austen’s novels and real life and introduces Austen as a capable life coach by how she guides her readers to understand virtue and vice through friendship, love, community, and God’s grace. Austen’s characters reveal how virtuous habits transform us and help us become who we were meant to be. Each chapter focuses on characters and virtues from a single novel: Do you find yourself swayed by superficial charm and yearn to see others more clearly? Let Elizabeth Bennet teach you how to recognize substance in others and address the pride in your own heart through the cultivation of humility (Pride and Prejudice). Are you stuck in selfishness that wounds others (and yourself)? Let Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley help you develop the compassion to see the world more clearly with the eyes of Christ (Emma). Do you get swept away into poor choices due to a lack of self-control? Let the Dashwood sisters show you the virtue of temperance and guide you to embrace your God-given personality and temperament (Sense and Sensibility. Do you have treasured ideals but struggle to live them out? Follow along with Edmund Bertram’s journey toward constancy through the example of Fanny Price (Mansfield Park). Have the disappointments of life grown resentment or bitterness in your heart? Be inspired by Anne Elliot’s vulnerable fortitude in the storms of life (Persuasion). Do you struggle to know what to do or who to believe in tricky situations? Join Catherine Morland in learning prudence to know and act on the truth (Northanger Abbey). Whether you are already an Austen fan or are discovering her works for the first time, Stewart’s infectious enthusiasm and captivating spiritual insights will have you digging in to experience firsthand the characters and stories that have captured imaginations in book and film for more than two centuries. Discussion questions and recommended film adaptations make this book suitable for individual or group use or as a high school classroom or homeschool resource. A free, downloadable leader’s guide is available at avemariapress.com.

Is the man I’m dating Mr. Darcy in disguise. . . or simply a jerk? It’s been two centuries since Jane Austen penned Pride & Prejudice and her many other classic novels, yet her adroit observations on the social landscape and profound insights into human nature are as relevant now as they were in her time. If only those of us in need of some good advice today had the opportunity to sit down and tap even a few drops from Austen’s great reservoirs of wisdom. Well, now we do. . . . In Miss Jane Austen’s Guide to Modern Life’s Dilemmas, Rebecca Smith channels her great-great-great-great-great aunt’s sense—and, of course, her sensibility—to help readers navigate their most pressing problems. Drawing on Austen’s novels, letters, and unpublished writings, Smith supplies readers with wise and wonderful counsel for living well in the 21st century. From instruction on how to gracefully “unfriend” someone on Facebook to answers for such timeless questions as “Can a man ever really change?” this book enables readers to nimbly navigate life’s most tricky terrain with the good sense, good manners, and abundant humor that are the mark of any great Austen heroine. Sensible, savvy, and funny, Miss Jane Austen’s Guide to Modern Life’s Dilemmas cleverly answers every Austen fan’s most earnest question: What would Jane do? Replete with lovely Austen-inspired color illustrations, as well as quotes from Austen’s various novels to support the advice given, this book is the ideal gift for the Jane Austen fanatic in your life.

Often compared to William Shakespeare, Jane Austen's genius was her cast of characters—so timeless and real that readers know them in their own families and neighborhoods today. Her book's universal themes—love and hate, hope and disappointment, pride and prejudice, sense and sensibility—still tug at heartstrings in cultures spanning the globe. Jane Austen lived during some of the most important events in history—the American Revolution, the French Revolution, British expansion in India, and the Napoleonic Wars. She wrote about daily life in England as she knew it, growing up a clergyman's daughter among the upper class of landowners, providing readers with a window into the soul of a lively, imaginative, and industrious woman in an age when most women were simply obscure shadows among society. A time line, resources for further study, places to visit, and 21 enriching activities round out this great resource for any reader looking for the woman behind the words.

Do Jane Austen novels truly celebrate—or undermine—romance and happy endings? How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers' thirst for romance? In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Austen scholar Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist's books in the first full-length study of Austen's endings. Through a careful exploration of Austen's own writings and those of the authors she read during her lifetime—as well as recent cultural reception and adaptations of her novels—Brodey examines the contradictions that surround this queen of romance. Brodey argues that Austen's surprising choices in her endings are an essential aspect of the writer's own sense of the novel and its purpose. Austen's fiercely independent and deeply humanistic ideals led her to develop a style of ending all her own. Writing in a culture that set a monetary value on success in marriage and equated matrimony with happiness, Austen questions these cultural norms and makes her readers work for their comic conclusions, carefully anticipating and shaping her readers' emotional involvement in her novels. Providing innovative and engaging readings of Austen's novels, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness traces her development as an author and her convictions about authorship, novels, and the purpose of domestic fiction. In a review of modern film adaptions of Austen's work, the book also offers new interpretations while illustrating how contemporary ideas of marriage and happiness have shaped Austen's popular currency in the Anglophone world and beyond.

Jane Austen is more of a celebrity and media queen now than she was in her lifetime. As a forensic observer of the social scene, with a mordant wit, ironic eye, and a sly way of puncturing pretension and seeing past the social faç ade, there is no doubt that if she had been with us today, she would have had her own column in an upmarket glossy a stylish, smartcookie agony aunt. Unfortunately, she did not get the opportunity, and so Jane Austens Guide to Modern Lifes Dilemmas is a crack at showing what it might have been like. This is a smart, sassy look at modern work, domestic, and romantic dilemmas, answered not by Jane Austen herself, but using her clear-eyed, witty, unsentimental view of life, love, and money with quotations from her books, letters, and unpublished writing as back-up. Treat it like a new and sensible best friend, to turn to whenever you are confronting lifes dilemmas (how can I stop saying yes to everything, what do I wear to a society wedding, is internet dating just for the desperate, etc).

Jane Austen is a mystery. The first incontrovertibly great woman novelist, she is, among other things, one of the finest prose stylists in literature; the first truly modern writer, the Godmother of chick lit. She is also the greatest enigma (next to Shakespeare) in English literature. Soldiers in the First World War sat in the trenches and read them for the civilising comforts they provided. Hard-nut literary critics such as F. R. Leavis lauded their austere complexity. World Book Day, 2007, found that Pride and Prejudice was the one book 'The nation can't live without'. In this witty, accessible guide, Charles Jennings goes in search of this enigma through her words as well as her times, including a short biography, an overview of the novels, as well as the world that she inhabited. Finally, the book contains Jane's very own words of advice for the modern life.

Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Austen come to write novels that have commanded the attention of some of the most brilliant minds ever since? Why were hers the books that Darwin knew by heart and Churchill read during the Blitz? In this graceful introduction to the author's life and works, Fiona Stafford offers a fresh and accessible perspective, discussing Austen's six astonishing novels in the context of their time. Newly updated, Jane Austen: A Brief Life offers a rich and sympathetic insight into a writer who was just as much the Romantic genius as Keats, Shelley or Byron - full of youthful exuberance, intensely creative once she had found her individual voice, and dead before she reached middle age.