Jane Austen collected her childhood writings into three manuscript notebooks, both as a record of her earliest work and for the convenience of reading aloud to her family and friends. Volume the First (as she entitled it) contains fourteen pieces - literary skits and family jokes - dating from about 1787, when she was eleven, to 1793. Amusing in themselves, they give us a direct picture of the lively literary and family milieu in which the novelist's juvenilia was formed. This new edtion carries a Foreword by Lord David Cecil, a former president of the Jane Austen Society and Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. There is also a Publisher's Preface by Brian Southam, author of Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts and other works on Jane Austen.

This smart new paperback edition contains the fully-reset text of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour. It features a beautifully decorated text and includes as a bonus the complete version of Tolkien's acclaimed lecture on Sir Gawain. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which examines religious and social values. Pearl is apparently an elegy on the death of a child, a poem pervaded with a sense of great personal loss: but, like Gawain it is also a sophisticated and moving debate on much less tangible matters. Sir Orfeo is a slighter romance, belonging to an earlier and different tradition. It was a special favourite of Tolkien's. The three translations represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the originals, and are uniquely accompanied with the complete text of Tolkien's acclaimed 1953 W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture that he delivered on Sir Gawain.