Austen's biography, complete with a nearly obsessive set of links, can be found at this site. There is some amazing stuff here, and it'll take you days to follow all the links and get all the information. But read the biography for an overview; I'll point you to some of the more useful links below.

I've put together some study notes on characters in Pride and Prejudice.

The full text of Pride and Prejudice in a text-only version. Remember that you can search for words and phrases in a Netscape document by selecting "Edit" and then selecting "Find."

The hypertext version of Pride and Prejudice at pemberley.com will provide you all the information you will probably ever need for understanding the work and its social context. The notes on education, marriage, and the status of women on this site are extremely helpful, especially in understanding the principles of entail that lead to the uncertain financial situation of the Bennet sisters. Again, this site is linked beyond all reason, but it is extraordinarily helpful.

The pemberley.com site will give you huge amounts of historical context, so check there first.

This next site will come up as a site on Northanger Abbey, but read it through and you will find that it comments on Austen's relationship to history, saying, "The novels communicate a profound sense of the movement in English history--when the old Georgian world of the eighteenth century was being carried uneasily and reluctantly into the new world of Regency England, the Augustan world into the romantic."

Ok, so this isn't exactly historical, but it's amusing. It appeared in Entertainment Weekly about the time Sense and Sensibility was part of the wave of Jane Austen projects in Hollywood.

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