Emma: A Novel. By the Author of “Pride and Prejudice.”

AUSTEN, Jane.

$4,500.00

Item Number: 145588

London: Richard Bentley, 1836.

Early separate issue from Bentley‘s Standard Novels series of the final novel published during Austen’s lifetime, a re-issue of the 1833 edition which was the first one-volume edition and first illustrated edition. Duodecimo, elaborately bound in three quarter morocco over marbled boards, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments, all edges marbled, illustrated with engraved frontispiece and pictorial title by Pickering and Greatbatch dated 1833. In very good condition with some rubbing to the extremities, spine, and rear panel, light toning and minor offsetting to the pictorial title, and antiquarian ownership signature to the front flyleaf. Reprints of Bentley‘s standard novels are scarce. “So few of these reprints survive in libraries, and even fewer in original condition..” (Gilson p. 225).

After many publishing delays, Austen decided to self-finance the publication of Emma, paying printer John Murray a 10% commission and retaining the remaining profits. "Emma was the fourth and last novel which Jane Austen published in her lifetime. When it was written the author was at the height of her powers, and she wrote the book rapidly and surely, encouraged by the success of her previous novels to express herself with confidence in the way peculiarly her own" (Rosenbach 29:24). "Jane Austen's fourth novel has a profundity similar to that of Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, only more elusive since Emma's character is far more subtle than Elizabeth or Marianne's… Austen's self-knowledge, her love of detail… [helped her] to create a proud, self-willed, self-guided, vexing and outrageous Emma and her greatest novel" (Honan, Jane Austen, 356-364). The novel has been adapted into several films, televised programs, and plays including the 1996 period film of the same name starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Alan Cumming, Toni Collette, Ewan McGregor, and Jeremy Northam.