When W. Somerset Maugham, famed novelist, playwright and critic was asked to select the world's ten greatest novels, Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE was one of his choices. When asked to expand his list to the world's twenty greatest novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac and Jane Austen scored again, Jane for her seventh and last novel, PERSUASION. Not bad for a young woman of whom another critic, Marc Schorer wrote, she "lived what was perhaps the...