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.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

HARDY THE NOVELIST BY DAVID CECIL THIS study was composed as a course of lectures. I fear that, transferred to the printed page, its mode of expression may seem at once too colloquial and too declamatory, too loose in structure and too emphatic in phrase, not to jar on a fastidious taste. If so, I hope my critics will remember that it was designed to be heard by an audience, not perused by a solitary reader and will grant me their indulgence. May I also take this occasion to thank the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, first for doing me the honour of inviting me to deliver the Clark Lectures, and secondly for the warmth of their welcome to me during my sojourn in their stately courts. D.C. CERTAINLY it is gratifying to be asked to deliver the Clark Lectures. Yet, when I first sat down seriouslyto consider the task before me, gratification changed to despondency. For these lectures meant literary criticism and, somehow, I found myself disinclined to add to the already formidable bulk of literary criticism. That spirit of disillusionment which, we are told, is characteristic of the present age, had begun, like the thin rays of a winter daybreak, to penetrate the antique seclusion of my College rooms, revealing their contents in a grey and. disenchanting light. I examined the rows of critical books which lined my shelves sound old fashioned works with titles like Towards a Theory of Comedy and i8th Century Influences in Romantic Poetry, or lively modern cantankerous books called Rhythm as Pattern and fEefragedy of Coleridge and was filled with a sense of futility. It is true that they were, most of them, ingenious and learned works and reading them was a pleasant enoughoccupation. Nor was it more harmful, I dare say, than gazing out of the window and watching the tawny leaves drift and circle one after another down the waters of the River Thames, But it was about as fruitful. For what, after all, was the good of it? How far did all this erudition and industry and illtemper make any difference to my appreciation of letters ? What living connection was there between thesebooks and the feeling stirred in me by reading Hamlet or The Ancient Mariner? The answer, I am afraid, is that there was very little. The reason that so much criticism is unprofitable is that the critics do not stick to their subject This subject is books. In every generation certain books are written which are works of art, which we read not fo any ulterior motivenot for instruction or edificationbu for the same reason that we go to a picture gallery or conceit: because reading them is in itself a satisfying experience. These books are the critics subject they art what he starts with, they are the cause and justification oi his existence. It is his function to illuminate our appreciation of them, to define the nature of the satisfaction they give, to analyse the circumstances conditioning their production and the arts by which they make their impressior This ought to be enough, work for any one man. Critics, however, seldom seem to think so.

This book describes the life of a man who struggled with desiring a walk with God but could not let go of the hurt caused him by the church. It details the road of tragedy that led him back to God and the dedication he now has to make sure no one has to suffer from their mistakes like he did. It shows how he rose from sinner to founding pastor of Brush Arbor Ministries in Glynn County, Georgia, and the determination he has to build a church that anyone who is seeking Christ can find him.

The two quiet lives are Dorothy Osborne, writer of the famous love letters to William Temple, and Thomas Gray, poet, Cambridge don and friend of Horace Walpole. They lived a century apart, but as David Cecil shows, were temperamentally akin. Both were reserved, introspective and prone to melancholy: both appeared awkward and difficult save to the few to whom they opened their hearts: both commanded a fund of humour and imagination and possessed an instinctive feeling for style: and both enjoyed an inner life which was vivid, strong and exciting. David Cecil's subtle and sympathetic study of two remarkable natures is a sustained piece of exquisite scholarship which reads as engagingly now as it did when first published in 1948.

Max Beerbohm is one of those figures, like Dr Johnson and Oscar Wilde, as well known as a personality as he is an artist. He was a superb parodist and cartoonist, and he was the leading wit and dandy of the Edwardian age. His very first book was boldly entitled The Works of Max Beerbohm (a collection of seven essays). He wrote mainly in miniature forms but his most famous work is his only novel Zuleika Dobson, a comic fantasy about undergraduate life at Oxford in the 1890s. David Cecil was appointed by Max Beerbohm to be his biographer. The choice could not have been more apt. Granted access to his private papers, David Cecil provides an intimate portrait of an odd, brilliant and most lovable human being, who was also a deeper and more considerable character than his facade betrayed. Besides being a picture of a man, this book is the picture of an age. In it the literary, theatrical and fashionable worlds of the 1890s and of Edward VII's reign appear in vivid detail as seen through the amused but penetrating eyes of Max: he knew everyone worth knowing in that era and had something to say about each of them. 'He has assembled all the available facts in a way to leave us grateful.' Evelyn Waugh, Sunday Times 'Here, exhibiting a small, delightful talent, is a large delightful book.' J. I. M. Stewart, Listener

First published in 1929, The Stricken Deer was the winner of that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize and also the Hawthornden Prize: it was David Cecil's first book. For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil's biography doesn't celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper's own words, 'the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.' Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression. His personal tragedy however enriched English literature: the fear of madness made him turn to writing poetry as a form of mental discipline, and isolation for the great world and from his own kind helped him to become the most enchanting of letter-writers. 'This is a sympathetic and vivid biography; it is subtle with a kind of gentle acuteness and vivid without literary ostentation. It is the work of a biographer with a clear head and a clever heart ... the rarest of all merits is the sensitive fairness of the of the biographer's estimate of character and situation throughout.' Desmond MacCarthy, Sunday Times

An eminent literary biographer and critic shows how poetry enriched the art of two representative English Romantic painters In Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil evokes the century of the poet-painter, when painting drew much of its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but now a recognized master, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), the Pre-Raphaelite daydreamer, once revered as a great painter but later admired chiefly for his work in applied art, emerge as artists who turned to their own inner lives to interpret Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.

Originally published in 1935, this volume contains the text of the Leslie Stephen Lecture for that year, delivered by Lord David Cecil at the University of Cambridge. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Jane Austen's life, career and characters.

Modern Library's 100th best non-fiction book of all time, and John F. Kennedy's favourite book. A masterful biography of the life of Lord Melbourne - Queen Victoria's Prime Minister and devoted mentor, and one of England's most controversial statesmen - whose turbulent marriage to Lady Caroline Lamb was one of the greatest scandals of the era. A charming, curious and altogether idiosyncratic figure, Melbourne is the perfect subject for a biography and David Cecil - with his elegant, thoughtful style and perfect scholarship - was his ideal biographer. The resulting work is a true classic of the genre and remains the most important and comprehensive account of Britain's most beguiling and individual Prime Minister. This volume contains the entirety of David Cecil's two seminal biographies of Lord Melbourne - The Young Melbourne and Lord M - in one definitive book. "A superb work of art" - Harold Nicholson "A historian of the heart" - L. P. Hartley

This book describes the life of a man who struggled with desiring a walk with God but could not let go of the hurt caused him by the church. It details the road of tragedy that led him back to God and the dedication he now has to make sure no one has to suffer from their mistakes like he did. It shows how he rose from sinner to founding pastor of Brush Arbor Ministries in Glynn County, Georgia, and the determination he has to build a church that anyone who is seeking Christ can find him.

His Waverley novels brought Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) great international fame in his own day. Many modern readers, however, find them too daunting, perhaps because of their considerable length. The aim of this volume is to introduce the general reader to Scott's prose fiction through his highly accessible short stories. These include the "straightforward" horror stories My Aunt Margaret's Mirror and The Tapestried Chamber and the masterly Wandering Willie's Tale with its weird expedition to Hell, told in broad Scots. The Highland Widow and The Two Drovers mirror the themes of some of Scott's great novels. The former deals with friction and misunderstanding between generations in a Highland family - with fatal consequences. The latter examines ideas of justice and honour when Highlander and Englishman collide - again with fatal consequences.Also included are The Fortunes of Martin Waldeck and Death of the Laird's Jock. With an Introduction by Ronald W. Renton and an Essay by David Cecil.

HARDY THE NOVELIST BY DAVID CECIL THIS study was composed as a course of lectures. I fear that, transferred to the printed page, its mode of expression may seem at once too colloquial and too declamatory, too loose in structure and too emphatic in phrase, not to jar on a fastidious taste. If so, I hope my critics will remember that it was designed to be heard by an audience, not perused by a solitary reader and will grant me their indulgence. May I also take this occasion to thank the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, first for doing me the honour of inviting me to deliver the Clark Lectures, and secondly for the warmth of their welcome to me during my sojourn in their stately courts. D.C. CERTAINLY it is gratifying to be asked to deliver the Clark Lectures. Yet, when I first sat down seriouslyto consider the task before me, gratification changed to despondency. For these lectures meant literary criticism and, somehow, I found myself disinclined to add to the already formidable bulk of literary criticism. That spirit of disillusionment which, we are told, is characteristic of the present age, had begun, like the thin rays of a winter daybreak, to penetrate the antique seclusion of my College rooms, revealing their contents in a grey and. disenchanting light. I examined the rows of critical books which lined my shelves sound old fashioned works with titles like Towards a Theory of Comedy and i8th Century Influences in Romantic Poetry, or lively modern cantankerous books called Rhythm as Pattern and fEefragedy of Coleridge and was filled with a sense of futility. It is true that they were, most of them, ingenious and learned works and reading them was a pleasant enough occupation. Nor was it more harmful, I dare say, than gazing out of the window and watching the tawny leaves drift and circle one after another down the waters of the River Thames, But it was about as fruitful. For what, after all, was the good of it? How far did all this erudition and industry and illtemper make any difference to my appreciation of letters ? What living connection was there between thesebooks and the feeling stirred in me by reading Hamlet or The Ancient Mariner? The answer, I am afraid, is that there was very little. The reason that so much criticism is unprofitable is that the critics do not stick to their subject This subject is books. In every generation certain books are written which are works of art, which we read not fo any ulterior motivenot for instruction or edificationbu for the same reason that we go to a picture gallery or conceit: because reading them is in itself a satisfying experience. These books are the critics subject they art what he starts with, they are the cause and justification oi his existence. It is his function to illuminate our appreciation of them, to define the nature of the satisfaction they give, to analyse the circumstances conditioning their production and the arts by which they make their impressior This ought to be enough, work for any one man. Critics, however, seldom seem to think so.

A biography of William Lamb, later to become Lord Melbourne, a man who would become prime minister of Great Britain at the height of the British empire and guide the young queen Victoria through the new world of government which she had entered upon her ascension to the throne. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.