Its large size and heavy weight, complemented by thick, wood-textured endpapers, acid-free cream-vellum paper, generous margins and woven bindings suggest an object important in its own right, an object and a form that will not go quietly into the good night. Its rich illustrations range from frontispieces and portraits to caricatures and Regency fashion plates, including a fine one for the Beaver Hat. Tandon’s explanatory notes are similarly comprehensive and serve to link Austen not only to contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and Charles Lamb, but also to lexical and thematic lines that run backwards, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding to Seneca, and forwards to James Joyce and the contemporary novelist Edward St Aubyn… Tandon’s notes often function as brief scholarly and historic articles in their own right, and the combined effect of these notes and illustrations is an edition of almost Talmudic ambition, but one that carries its erudition without sacrificing readability… Tandon’s notes are superb… One of the great merits of Tandon’s edition is that, without breaking the spell of Austen’s fiction, he presents her work as so very much of her time, whether that be in her conceptual relation to moralists such as Samuel Johnson, or in the social resonances of foodstuffs, clothing and card games.
