Love and Freindship

Jane Austen’s earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven-years-old, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work. But it is also a product of the times in which she grew up—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 mothers’ fingers, and a letter-writer who has murdered her whole family all feature in these highly spirited pieces. This edition includes all of Austen’s juvenilia, including her “History of England” and the novella Lady Susan, in which the anti-heroine schemes and cheats her way through high society. With a title that captures a young Austen’s original idiosyncratic spelling habits and an introduction by Christine Alexander that shows how Austen was self-consciously fashioning herself as a writer from an early age, this is a must-have for any Austen lover.

About the Contributors

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, England. As a girl, she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. She lived with her family in Steventon until her father, a clergyman in the Church of England, retired in 1801. After his death, in 1805, she, her mother, and her sister did not have a settled home until 1809, when they moved to Chawton, Hampshire. There she was extraordinarily productive, revising three novels and writing three more from scratch. Published during her lifetime were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Austen died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, where she was receiving medical treatment, and was buried in that city’s cathedral. Two more novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. She also left two earlier compositions: a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.

Christine Alexander is the Scientia Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, and the general editor of the Juvenilia Press.

Coralie Bickford-Smith is an award-winning designer at Penguin Books (U.K.), where she has created several highly acclaimed series designs. She studied typography at Reading University and lives in London.