Jane Austen - The Complete Novels - Special Edition

By: Jane Austen

Narrated by: Beth Kesler

Length: 78 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

This book contains the complete novels of Jane Austen in the chronological order of their original publication.

• "Lady Susan" Starts at Chapter 1,
• Sense and Sensibility Starts at Chapter 43,
• Pride and Prejudice Starts at Chapter 93,
• Mansfield Park Starts at Chapter 154,
• Emma Starts at Chapter 202,
• Persuasion Starst at Chapter 256,
• Northanger Abbey Starts at Chapter 280,
• The Watson Starts at Chapter 310.

Bonus:

• Sanditon ''Unfinished Masterpiece'' Starts at Chapter 314.

©2019 Jane Austen (P)2019 Page2Page

Hours of enjoyment

After hearing Pride and Prejudice in another collection of novels, I was curious to hear more Jane Austin. I was not disappointed. I enjoyed each novel very much

Captivating

A book I always come back to... Jane strength, determination and persistence is so inspiring. Thandie Newton's narration is so captivating.

Complete, but with challenges

It is wonderful to have the complete works of Jane Austen for such a low price but it comes at the cost of a difficult interface and lack luster performance. The added bonus of having the two unfinished works herein called the Watsons and Sanditon is good to compare what Miss Austen actually wrote as opposed to the attempts others make to complete her work. I found the Watson’s interesting and wanting more, and Sanditon ends before any of the conflict or tension which occurs in the modern work of fame which I found to be not in keeping with Miss Austen’s other works.
Listening to multi-book sets on Audible is generally unpleasant for the following reasons I’ve experienced with this and 2 other sets I’ve listened in the past. There are 7 parts that each start with chapter 1 which does not correspond to the brief legend in the book description so it is easy to get lost. For instance the book description says only that a certain book starts at chapter 280, but that may be part volume 7 chapter 3 in the visual interface although the performer reads the chapter of the current book; all three are different.
I found the performer generally pleasant to listen to, however her voice is not the most engaging and with the challenges of reading in the tone and accent of so many characters some character voices chosen were annoying for the more insipid or bothersome characters. The entire works are read in English from a British accent of indiscernible origin, but each book is introduced in only German adding to the difficulty of navigating the work.

Starting Chapters for Each Book

Since each part of the audible download begins again with Chapter 1, the chapter information on the page doesn't help a lot. I created my own index. Hope this helps.

Lady Susan (Part 1/Chapter 1)
Sense and Sensibility (Part 1/Chapter 43)
Pride and Prejudice (Part 2/Chapter 10)
Mansfield Park (Part 3/Chapter 15)
Emma (Part 4/Chapter 23)
Persuasion (Part 5/Chapter 41)
Northanger Abbey (Part 6/Chapter 25)
The Watson (Not sure. Should be around Part 7/Chapter 16)
Sanditon (Part 7/Chapter 20)

Not organized

Very hard to keep track of where you are are, and bits of German between books or chapters are extremely disconcerting.

LOVE THIS EDITION, NARATOR, HATE AUDIO

BOOK IS OF COMPLETE WORKS GREAT NARRATOR. BAD AUDIO. DOWNLOAD WITH CAUTION. READ AND ENJOY.

Finally got to hear all her stories

The last couple were hard to listen to as they are unfinished and end abruptly but as for the recording it would be nice to get a sound or music or some announcement of next book….

Ruined by a terrible voice

Jane Austen's exqusite novels should be pure British fun. An uneducated sounding heavy voice with an American accent just does not match the witty dialogues and amusing narration.
Wish I could return the book now that I remember how disappointed I was when I started listening and stopped in frustration.

refuses to download

i was so rxcited for this. i have tried every troubleshooting step. but it just won't load. it makes me sad to return it and 2 others with sinular tidals that won't down load

Unforgivable Technical Difficulties

It's Jane Austin so it's brilliant. There is however a good reason that it is so cheap.

The performer is good, though her British accent sounds overly studied. Her worst sin is her hard-to-listen-to squeaky, broken, daft voice used for all the unappealing, unintelligent characters. She also, inexplicably uses a version of this daft voice for Lizzie Bennett?! What?!

She reads some of the stable characters: Jane Bennett and Elinor Dashwood with a plodding, unpleasant gravitas.

There's the tiny, but always distracting for me, affectation of her pronunciation of the word "room." She pronounces room "rum," flat out, like an American saying "rum" 85% of the time.

However, the technical difficulties are unforgivable, ergo the one star review.
There are 325 audio chapters, none of them labled, so you cannot pop into the book you want. You must fast forward through, chapter by chapter, and listen to the beginning of chapters as you go, to figure out which book you're in. If you do not yet know Austen's works, this is no way to introduce yourself to them.

The book, after months of owning it, has never downloaded completely, so if I turn the Audible app off, once I turn it on again, and try to listen to this book, it starts its interminable downloading process from word one, so that it's necessary to fast forward from chapter one once again. For this reason, it's a book you cannot listen to on the road unless you want to use up all your data since it's constantly downloading.

And then, it corrupts as it downloads, such that you ant even fast forward it! It often gets stuck on a book you've already listened to.

Why didn't the make it so that you could choose one book at a time and down load it book by book? Then it would have cost $80 rather than the $6.99 or whatever I paid for it