Jane Austen's brilliant, hilarious - and often outrageous - early
stories, sketches and pieces of nonsense, in a beautiful Penguin
Classics clothbound edition. Jane Austen's earliest writing dates
from when she was just eleven years, and already shows the
hallmarks of her mature work: wit, acute insight into human folly,
and a preoccupation with manners, morals and money. But they are
also a product of the eighteenth century she grew up in - dark,
grotesque, often surprisingly bawdy, and a far cry from the
polished, sparkling novels of manners for which she became famous.
Drunken heroines, babies who bite off their mother's fingers, and a
letter-writer who has murdered her whole family all feature in
these very funny pieces. This edition includes all of Austen's
juvenilia, including her 'History of England' - written by 'a
partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian' - and the novella
'Lady Susan', in which the anti-heroine schemes and cheats her way
through high society. Taken together, they offer a fascinating -
and often surprising - insight into the early Austen. This major
new edition is the first time Austen's juvenilia has appeared in
Penguin Classics. Edited by Christine Alexander, it includes an
introduction, notes and other useful editorial materials. Jane
Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke,
the seventh child of the rector of the parish. In her youth she
wrote many burlesques, parodies and other stories, including a
short epistolary novel, Lady Susan. On her father's retirement in
1801, the family moved to Bath, and subsequently to Chawton in
Hampshire. The novels published in Austen's lifetime include Sense
and Sensibility(1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park
(1814) and Emma (1816). Persuasion was written in a race against
failing health in 1815-16, and was published, together with
Northanger Abbey, posthumously in 1818. Austen died in Winchester
on 18 July 1817. Christine Alexander is Scientia Professor of
English at the University of New South Wales and general editor of
the Juvenilia Press. She has published extensively on the Brontes
and has co-edited the first book on literary juvenilia, The Child
Writer from Austen to Woolf (2005). 'Spirited, easy, full of fun,
verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense...At fifteen she had few
illusions about other people and none about herself' - Virginia
Woolf' [Her] inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of
Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter' - G. K.
Chesterton
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