The standard edition is The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3rd ed., 6 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965-73). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are both in Volume 5. Volume 6 contains the minor works. Jane Austen's early dramatic version of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison has been edited by Brian Southam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). The letters have been edited by Deirdre Le Faye (3rd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
2. Bibliography.
Chapman, R.W. Jane Austen: A Critical Bibliography. 2nd ed.. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953.
Gilson, David. A Bibliography of Jane Austen. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. [Based on the 1929 bibliography by Geoffrey Keynes, but much expanded in date and scope; no annotation. It was republished (St. Paul's Bibliographies) in 1997, but no new material was added.]
Grey, J. David. The Jane Austen Companion. New York: Macmillan, 1986. [Includes articles on various aspects of Jane Austen, expert bibliographical summaries, and "A Dictionary of Jane Austen's Life and Works."]
Handley, Graham. Jane Austen. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992. [Useful, if pedestrian, summaries of scholarship from the nineteenth century to the 1980s. (I have occasionally used it for books I was unable to see.) It is occasionally inaccurate in details (e.g., dates), and lacks an index (but works are discussed chronologically within chapters).]
Pinion, F.B. A Jane Austen Companion: A Critical Survey and Reference Book. London: Macmillan, 1973. [Compendious and miscellaneous information, including bibliographies for the novels.]
Poplawski, Paul. A Jane Austen Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. [Includes several chronologies (biographical, historical, literary) and encyclopedic entries on the characters in Austen's novels, on many of the allusions, and on many of the people in Austen's life (with strange omissions). Good bibliography of books on Austen to 1996.]
Roth, Barry. An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austin Studies, 1973-83. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985. An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies 1984-94. Athens: Ohio University Press. 1996. [Compendious and full-annotated bibliographies, organized by year of publication.]
3. Biography.
Austen-Leigh, William and Richard Arthur. Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, A Family Record. 1913; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965. [Based on family records and anecdotes, it provides valuable--often unique--material but emphasizes Jane Austen as beloved aunt.]
Cecil, David. A Portrait of Jane Austen. London, 1978. [A relatively brief and straightforward treatment of the life, personality, and context.]
Chapman, R.W. Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. 1948; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. [For many years the standard scholarly source for biographical information.]
Fergus, Jan. Jane Austen: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. [Not a full biography but a chronological consideration of the development of Austen's art in the context of information about authorship and publication during her life.]
Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. [A recent and detailed biography, but some readers find it strained in its search for the sources of Austen's irony and in its somewhat hostile views of the novels.]
Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. [A full, well-researched study, emphasizing her family life, and commenting intelligently on her books. Without eliminating the thorns of her personality, it is more sympathetic than the biography of Halperin.]
Nokes, David. Jane Austin: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. [A lengthy, detailed, and vivid biography that concentrates on the life rather than the works. Although skeptical about dubious family traditions, Nokes's own account is highly imaginative and suppresses contrary evidence. Nokes speculates particularly about the histories of Austen's friends and relatives, and much of that material seems distracting.]
Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1997. [Places Austen in the context of contemporary expectations for women and of her family network. Tomalin is sensitive and thoughtful in her straightforward account and distinguishes clearly between interpretation and speculation. Provides summaries of the novels and their contexts.]
Wiltshire, John. Recreating Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [A book on the treatment of Austin and her novels in the film, but the first chapter is a discussion of attitudes towards Austin in imagined biographies (and virtually all biographies of her are imagined).]
4. Collections of Essays.
Halperin, John, ed. Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974. [See especially Burlin on NA and Litz on P.]
Heath, William. Discussions of Jane Austen. Boston: Heath, 1961. [See, especially, reprinted essays by Virginia Woolf, H.W. Garrod (a "depreciation"), Walter Allen, C.S. Lewis; no essays specifically on NA and P, but see Lionel Trilling on Mansfield Park.]
Monaghan, David, ed. Jane Austen in a Social Context. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981. [Includes essays on the treatment of women, on leisure, on volume structure, on generational conflict, on romanticism.]
Southam, B.C., ed. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1976. [Includes nineteenth-century "opinions" and major twentieth-century "studies" on both novels. Except for one essay (Southam on Mudrick on Northanger Abbey) the essays were previously published.]
Watt, Ian, ed. Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. [Especially essays by Virginia Woolf, Alan D. McKillop (on NA), Trilling (on MP), Andrew Wright (on P), Donald J. Greene, and D.W. Harding.]
Weinsheimer, Joel, ed. Jane Austen Today. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975. [See especially Donovan, Greene, Kroeber (on NA).]
White, Laura Mooneyham, ed. Critical Essays on Jane Austen. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. [Not seen, but the fact that it was out at three libraries is a positive sign. Other essay collections in the Hall series have reprinted important but previously published essays.]
5. Critical Studies.
Babb, Howard S. Jane Austen's Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962. [Perceptive analysis of dialogue as action and as subtle revelation of character.]
Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and Her Predecessors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. [Chapters on the general literary tradition, the novelistic tradition, the feminist tradition, and other influences.]
Brown, Julia Prewitt. Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. [The treatment of domesticity and of the complex personal and social issues it involves reaches its maturity in the novels of Austen, which fluctuate between ironic comedies emphasizing social background (as in Northanger Abbey) and satiric realism emphasizing fatigue and disillusionment (as in Persuasion, of which Brown takes a particularly dark view).]
- - -. "The Feminist Depreciation of Austen." Novel 23 (Spring 1990): 303-13. [Castigates recent feminist critics--especially Mary Poovey and Claudia L. Johnson--both for their ahistorical reading of Jane Austen and their ahistorical practice of feminism.]
Brownstein, Rachel M. "Getting Married: Jane Austen." In Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Viking Press, 1982. 79-134. [Jane Austen rewrites "the play between consciousness and convention" found in Richardson. Her heroines wonder whether they can in fact control their lives. (They can, but it's a matter of luck.)]
Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. [Distinguishes between "jacobin" writers, who made individual consciousness and fulfillment central, and "anti-jacobin" writers who emphasized conformity to a social order. Jane Austen is in the "anti-jacobin" camp, as readings of the novels consistently show.]
Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. [A collection of original essays on major Austen topics, including Rachel Brownstein on the novels of the 1790s, John Wiltshire on the Chawton novels, and further essays by major scholars on the short fiction, the letters, class, money, religion and politics, style, women writers, literary traditions, and "Austen cults and cultures." Useful bibliographical essay.]
Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. [The relationship between the isolated individual and society, between flawed society and the ideal values it should embody.]
Duffy, Joseph M., Jr. "Structure and Idea in Jane Austen's Persuasion." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 8 (1954): 272-89. [JA's complex treatment of time, class, and motivation.]
Dussinger, John. In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen's World. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990. [Concentrates on "Austen's art of coloring narration and dialogue to render a character's point of view within carefully arranged encounters," especially in Emma. Includes chapters on play, the "narrative structure of desire," characterization, speech, and the process of reading and writing.]
Elsbree, Langdon. "Jane Austen and the Dance of Fidelity and Complaisance." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15 (1960): 113-36. [The narrative and ritualistic functions of dance in the novels and their society.]
Fergus, Jan. Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983. [The tension between social realism and art produces irony in Jane Austen; she is a didactic novelist concerned to guide the emotions and judgment but by a complexly unconventional method that challenges the reader. Sees Northanger Abbey in contrast to the later (superior) novels. Its purpose is manifested in the burlesque of sentimental and gothic conventions (which Fergus analyses in some detail). Sees the novel's burlesque as limiting the depth of its characters.]
Gard, Roger. Jane Austen's Novels" The Art of Clarity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. [Strong critical essays on each of the major novels, as well as Lady Susan and Sanditon.]
Gold, Joel J. "The Return to Bath: Catherine Morland to Anne Eliot." Genre 9 (1976): 213-29. [Austen's use of Bath is quite different in the two novels: in Northanger Abbey Bath is a satiric target; in Persuasion it is the setting for Anne's virtuous behavior.]
Hardy, Barbara. A Reading of Jane Austen. New York: New York University Press, 1976. [Organized topically rather than by novel, Hardy's study seeks to integrate narrative style with social and psychological issues.]
Harris, Jocelyn. Jane Austen's Art of Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. [Reading is an important index of character in Jane Austen; Harris expands this truism by seeing intertextuality--not always the most obvious--as a key to Austen's novels. For example, Northanger Abbey represents the epistemological and pedagogical views of Locke.]
Hart, Francis R. "The Spaces of Privacy: Jane Austen." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (1975): 305-33. [Architecture and place as images and manifestations of the relationships between the private self and the social group.]
Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. [Looks at Austen's relationship to traditions of female and political novelists, from whom she draws and differs, and with whom she shares "their artistic strategies and their commitment to uncovering the ideological underpinnings of cultural myths." Analyzes the novels from a feminist perspective.]
Kaplan, Deborah. Jane Austen among Women. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. [Chapters on social contexts and Austen's position as a woman writer introduce feminist readings of the Juvenalia, of Lady Susan and The Watsons, and of Pride and Prejudice.]
Knox-Shaw, Peter. "Northanger Abbey and the Liberal Historians." Essays in Criticism 49.4 (October 1999): 319-43. [Austen's treatment of the writing of history, of the historicity of Gothic novels, and of the historical present of Northanger Abbey takes a complex view of events as "the meeting-point of opposite influences" through a shifting of perspective that resembles the liberal historians, especially Hume.]
Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. 1939; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. [Chapters on biography, reading and response, style, and narrative art; this classic study remains almost always the first place to look.]
Leavis, Q.D. "Jane Austen." In A Selection from Scrutiny. Cambridge University Press, 1968. 2:1-80. [A reprint of three important Scrutiny articles of the early 1940s that focus on the "composing process" in the novels; many observations remain useful, but the factual conjectures are attacked in Southam (1964).]
Litz, A. Walton. Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. [Chapters on the individual novels, usually yoking major novels with minor writings; a major and standard study.]
Loveridge, Mark. "Northanger Abbey; or, Nature and Probability." Nineteenth-Century Literature 46.1 (June 1991): 1-29. [Argues that NA is about "nature" and "probability" in much the same way as Sense and Sensibility is about those abstract qualities. NA is a transitional novel in which social and historical context is important, and it is more coherent than often thought.]
Martin, Graham. Austin and Class." Women's Writing 5.1 (1998): 131-44. [Argues that Austen's agricultural society did not have the idea of class applied to it by Marxist and other modern critics. Considers the interplay of ethical and social meanings of the term "gentleman" in Austen's novels. Unlike the earlier novels, Persuasion sees the meanings as irreconcilable.]
Morgan, Susan. In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen's Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. [Jane Austen's novels "as speculative resolutions to the general issue of how we perceive."]
---. "Why There is no Sex in Jane Austen's Novels." Studies in the Novel 19 (Fall 1987): 346-56. [The reason--established by contrasts to earlier novels--is that Austen's heroines do not need the threat of male sexuality to mature, that wisdom does not require the loss of innocence.]
Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952. [Readings of each of the novels to support the view that JA alternated between irony and conventionality. An early assertion of an unconventional and ungentle Austen.]
Neill, Edward. The Politics of Jane Austen. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1999. [Argues that "Jane Austen's fictional discourse is much more politically destabilized and destabilizing than critical convoy for Austen's work has been at all eager to acknowledge." Northanger Abbey reveals the evils of General Tilney not only as an impolite host but as the emblem of exploitative agricultural capitalism, and it undercuts Henry Tilney's rationalist ideology to show him as domineering and sexist. Catherine may get other things wrong, but under the "back veil" is capitalism and, in its broad sense, politics.]
Price, Martin. "Manners, Morals, and Jane Austen." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (1974): 261-80. [Jane Austen is genuinely comic, rather than cynical or satiric, because she is amused by the play of incongruities, because she sees moral judgments as complex, and because she remains open to experience.]
Rothstein, Eric. "The Lessons of Northanger Abbey." University of Toronto Quarterly 44 (1974): 14-30. [The education of the reader parallels the education of the heroine. Catherine learns that life is more complex than books; the reader learns that books depend upon life (rather than on fictional conventions).]
Ruderman, Anne Crippen. The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleman, 1995. [Neither conservative nor subversive, Austen advocates a politics of moderation that rejects aggressive individualism and accepts general social norms. The appropriate social position is embodied in the happy marriage, and the chief concern of the novels is the education of their heroines in moral perception. Moral behavior in Austen leads to happiness.]
Schorer, Mark. "Fiction and the 'Analogical Matrix.'" Kenyon Review 11 (1949): 539-60. [Focuses on Persuasion and traces the economic nature and implications of style. A classic article, widely anthologized.]
Seeber, Barbara K. General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study in Dialogism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. [The first chapter reviews doubts about Austen's politics (conservative v. concealed subversive) and argues, using Bakhtin and Althusser, that "this contradiction and simultaneity, this being both conservative and radical at the same time, constitutes the dialogic nature of her work." The chapter on Northanger Abbey makes the familiar point that Catherine is more-or-less right about General Tilney.]
Shaw, Narelle. "Free Indirect Speech and Jane Austen's 1816 Revision of Northanger Abbey." Studies in English Literature 30 (Autumn 1990): 591-601. [Free indirect speech (the use of quotation within direct discourse) is a characteristic of Austen's later novels but not her early ones. Its effective use in NA strengthens the case for a 1816-1817 revision that connects the novel with Persuasion and Sanditon.]
Southam, Brain C. "'An Easy Step to Silence': Jane Austen and the Political Context." Women's Writing 501 (19998): 7-26. [Both Butler's notion of a conservative Austen and counter notions of a subversive one depend on rather broad and vague uses of the term "politics." In the more traditional sense (party politics, national and international affairs) Austen herself was very political. Most of her family were Burkean Tories. She herself had pro-Stuart sympathies. The family supported Warren Hastings who, after his trial ended in acquittal, was useful to the naval brothers. Although the French Revolution never surfaces in the works, the execution of her cousin's husband in the Reign of Terror led Austen to loath the Republicans. Though not directly connected to the novels, Austen's political views connect her as a historical individual to the historical world.]
---. Jane Austin and the Navy. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000. [Looks in considerable detail at the naval careers of Jane Austin's brothers Francis and Charles. Neither, Southam argues, was a model for Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, but both, and Austen's knowledge of naval affairs in general, were sources of detailed information in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Includes a chapter on patriotism in Emma.]
---. Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist's Development through the Surviving Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. [A major critical and scholarly study of the unpublished material--especially that for which manuscripts survive; it seeks to account for JA's development and for the use of earlier material and tendencies in the published novels.]
Sulloway, Alison G. Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. [Sees Jane Austen as a satirist, and builds that case in terms of feminist predecessors and her treatment of important topics concerning the positions of women.]
Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. [Sees Austen's novels (analyzed separately) in their historical context, but emphasizes their "wit, ironic reflectiveness, and moral intelligence," and especially "the writer's moral relation to language."]
Tave, Stuart. Some Words of Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. [Tave is concerned with language in itself and as a metaphor for the discovery of meaning by JA heroines; a lovely and unpretentious study.]
Thompson, James. Between Self and the World: The Novels of Jane Austen. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. [Marxist study that seeks "to historicize Austen's language, as well as the feeling expressed in it, by examining emotion in Austen's fiction in light of a wide range of historical circumstances." The central conflict of the novels is between "the gentry's nostalgic code of paternalism" and the individual consciousness. Topical organization.]
Wallace, Tara Ghoskal. "Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody" In Jane Austen and Narrative Authority. New York: St. Martin's, 1995. 17-30. [Argues that in undermining the reliability of Henry Tilney, the novel's residual ironist, Austin undermines parody in Northanger Abbey, creating a clash of genres that "refuses to yield a stable vision, either moral or aesthetic," leaving to readers the determination of meaning.]
Wiesenforth, Joseph. The Errand of Form: An Assay of Jane Austen's Art. New York: Fordham University Press, 1967. [The relationship between "patterns in the novels and the character of those persons who develop within those patterns"; chapters on the individual novels.]
Wright, Andrew H. Jane Austen's Novels" A Study in Structure. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. [Explores the juxtaposition of exclusive patterns in JA; chapters on theme, point of view, style, and each of the major novels.]