Here we come to know Jane Austen by the company she keeps: her predecessors Fielding, Sterne, Lennox, and Burney, her contemporary Scott, and her successors Waugh and Amis—comic novelists all. And comedy is the connection between these twelve elegant essays by the distinguished academic Bruce Stovel, who most lovingly engages Austen herself through his studies of her comic novels, her art of conversation, her pleasure principle, and her prayers. Edited by Nora Foster Stovel, the collection includes an introduction by Juliet McMaster and an afterword by Isobel Grundy. Introduction by Juliet McMaster. Afterword by Isobel Grundy.

Bruce Stovel (1941–2007) was Professor of English at the University of Alberta, specializing in eighteenth-century literature and the English novel. He co-edited two collections of essays on Austen and contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Stovel's passion for teaching, literature, and blues music was celebrated in the recent collection, Jane Austen Sings the Blues.

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Nora Foster Stovel is Professor of English at the University of Alberta, where she teaches twentieth-century literature and Canadian women's fiction. She has published books and articles on Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Carol Shields, and Margaret Laurence, most recently Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study of Her Complete Writings.

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