'Jane Austen practising' Virginia Woolf


Three notebooks of Jane Austen's teenage writings survive. The earliest pieces probably date from 1786 or 1787, around the time that Jane, aged 11 or 12, and her older sister and collaborator Cassandra left school. By this point Austen was already an indiscriminate and precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature alike; what she read, she soon began to imitate and parody.

Unlike many teenage writings then and now, these are not secret or agonized confessions entrusted to a private journal and for the writer's eyes alone. Rather, they are stories to be shared and admired by a named audience of family and friends. Devices and themes which appear subtly in Austen's later fiction run riot openly and exuberantly across the teenage page. Drunkenness, brawling, sexual misdemeanour, theft, and even murder prevail.

Introduction
Chronology of Composition of Items in the Teenage Notebooks
Note on the Text
Note on Spelling
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Jane Austen
Maps
VOLUME THE FIRST
Frederic & Elfrida
Jack & Alice
Edgar & Emma
Henry & Eliza
Mr Harley
Sir William Mountague
Mr Clifford
The beautifull Cassandra
Amelia Webster
The Visit
The Mystery
The three Sisters
Detached peices
Ode to Pity
VOLUME THE SECOND
Love and Friendship
Lesley-Castle
The History of England
Collection of Letters
Scraps
VOLUME THE THIRD
Evelyn
Kitty, or the Bower
FAMILY CONTINUATIONS TO VOLUME THE THIRD
Continuation of 'Evelyn', by James Edward Austen
Continuation of 'Evelyn', by Anna Lefroy
Continuation of 'Kitty, or the Bower', by James Edward Austen
APPENDIX
Letter of Sophia Sentiment from The Loiterer, 28 March 1789
Abbreviations
Textual Notes
Explanatory Notes

Jane Austen

Kathryn Sutherland is Professor of Bibliography & Textual Criticism in the University of Oxford. She is the editor of James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections for Oxford World's Classics. She has created a digital edition of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts (2010), the print edition of which is due to be published by OUP in 2017. She is the author of Jane Austen's Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (OUP, 2005). Freya Johnston is University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is the author of Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709-1791 (2005) and general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (2016 - ).