Juvenilia

About this book

Jane Austen's remarkable juvenilia date from 1787, when she was eleven, to 1793, when she was seventeen. She preserved these early writings in three manuscript notebooks, entitled 'Volume the first', 'Volume the second' and 'Volume the third'. Most of the twenty-seven items in these notebooks are short fictions, but the young Austen also wrote the opening of what could have become a full-length novel, 'Catharine', as well as dramatic sketches, verses and a few non-fictional pieces. Astonishingly sophisticated and inventive, these writings, with their anarchic energy, violence and irreverence, are now receiving the scholarly attention they deserve. This edition provides a fresh transcription of Austen's manuscripts, with comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the juvenilia, a chronology of Austen's life, and an authoritative textual apparatus. It also prints, for the first time, the copious satirical marginalia that Austen wrote on her copies of Oliver Goldsmith's History of England.--Book jacket.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Jane Austen

December 16, 1775 – July 18, 1817

Jane Austen was an English writer. Although Austen was widely read in her lifetime, she published her works anonymously. The most urgent preoccupations of her bright, young heroines are courtship and marriage. Austen herself never married. Her best-known books include *Pride and Prejudice* (1813) and *Emma* (1816). Virginia Woolf called Austen "the most perfect artist among women.