Juvenilia

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,…