Introduction

Summary

In a letter to her sister Cassandra of 23 August 1814, Jane Austen refers to some odd travelling arrangements that ‘put me in mind of my own Coach between Edinburgh&Sterling’. The allusion is to the ending of ‘Love and Freindship’, perhaps the most brilliant of all her youthful productions and the one most appreciated by critics since the rediscovery of her early writings began in the 1920s. Astonishingly sophisticated and inventive, these writings are now receiving the attention they deserve, after long being overshadowed by the six published novels. The present volume is the fourth collected edition of Austen's juvenilia, following those edited by R.W. Chapman in 1954, Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray in 1993, and Janet Todd in 1998, and the first to include the copious marginalia that she wrote on her copies of Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume History of England (1772) and Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Extracts … in Prose. Chapman, afraid that they might detract from Austen's stature as a novelist, presented the juvenilia diffidently, declaring that ‘these immature or fragmentary fictions call for hardly any comment’. Fifty years later, Austen's remarkable early fictions, fragmentary though some of them are, can no longer be dismissed as mere apprentice work, and rather than damaging Austen's reputation they have come to augment it. With what Doody has aptly termed their ‘ruthless and exuberant style of comic vision’, they represent not an embryonic form of the later novels but a major achievement in their own right. Ruthlessness and exuberance also pervade Austen's letters, but these qualities are muted in her mature fiction until the last novel, Sanditon, on which she was working until the final months of her life and which has something of the wild abruptness of her earliest writings. Scattered allusions to the juvenilia in her letters, as well as occasional revisions made in 1811 or later, show that Austen continued to value her first productions. Unlike Frances Burney, who in 1767 destroyed all of her juvenilia – everything she wrote before Evelina – in a ceremonial bonfire on her fifteenth birthday, Austen preserved her early writings until her death in 1817.