Complete and unabridged, with 100 full-page plates by Thomas Gainsborough, J. M. W. Turner and Edward William Cooke. A young woman with a sharp tongue and no fortune meets a rich man with worse manners than her own, and both spend the book discovering how badly they read each other. Austen wrote the first draft at twenty-one and could not sell it; the novel appeared sixteen years later, anonymously, as by the author of Sense and Sensibility. Nobody has improved on its opening sentence since. A hundred plates after Steen and Raeburn, ranging from peasant weddings and parrot cages to Regency portraits, restore the crowded, watchful world of courtship and property that Austen's lovers must navigate.