From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about 35 years old. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Īusten lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry.
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. 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. 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.
Jane Austen’s earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven-years-old, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work. Austen’s hilarious early stories and sketches-complete with her delightfully quirky spelling habits-now collected in one gorgeous clothbound volume
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