the front disfigured by a water-stained splodge. This final volume contains only two works: a fragmentary story called ‘Evelyn’ and the much longer, though still unfinished, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’. The first page is signed and dated ‘Jane Austen – May 6th 1792’. A pencil note on the inside of the board opposite, in her father’s hand, sounds a note of paternal pride: ‘Effusions of Fancy by a Very Young Lady consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new’.1
These are the earliest works of Jane Austen, copied in her best hand and preserved by her. Why did she write them out in this way? First and foremost, for the amusement of her family. Pasted to the inside front board of Volume the First, the most worn of the three, is a note penned by Cassandra after her sister’s death: ‘For my brother Charles. I think I recollect that a few of the trifles in this Vol. were written expressively for his amusement.’ But Jane Austen also took the trouble of creating these books, which involved much labour with goose quill and inkwell, so as to present herself, at least in her own imagination, as a professional author. Though written by hand, the volumes have the accoutrements of proper published books: contents lists, dedications, chapter divisions. Even as a teenager, Jane Austen knew what she wanted from life: to be a writer.
Her literary career began in 1787, the year that she turned twelve. One could almost say that, like Mozart, she was a child prodigy. Throughout her teens she continued to write stories and plays, sketches and histories, burlesques and parodies. Their original manuscripts are lost, but the fair copies in the vellum notebooks amount to some ninety thousand words. This body of work has become known as her ‘juvenilia’. Though the contents of the vellum notebooks are now well known to scholars, they are still often neglected by readers and even biographers. Yet these early works provide extraordinary insight into the vivid and often wild imagination of the real Jane Austen.
Virginia Woolf was the first to observe that Jane Austen’s juvenile writings were ‘meant to outlast the Christmas holidays’. That, at the tender age of fifteen, she was writing ‘for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own’. Woolf’s admiration for the sheer exhilaration and breathless energy of Austen’s earliest comic sketches expresses itself in the adjectives ‘astonishing’ and ‘unchildish’.2 What do we make of a sentence such as this from Austen’s first ‘novel’, which has an endearingly youthful spelling mistake in its title, ‘Love and Freindship’? ‘She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging Young Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her – she was only an Object of Contempt.’3 Good girls the object of contempt? Not exactly the image of Austen that her family members sought to establish in the memoirs of her that they wrote after her death. ‘The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world,’ observed Woolf. ‘Girls of fifteen are always laughing,’ she adds – to which we might add: especially when like Austen and Woolf herself they are one of a pair of sisters in a household full of boys.
Very near the end of her life Jane Austen passed on a message to her niece that her one regret as a writer was that she wrote too much at an early age. She advised her niece to spend her time reading rather than taking up the pen too early.4 So perhaps she would not be entirely pleased to know that her early teenage work is now widely read. But although the early stories were not intended for public consumption, she continued to enjoy and indeed to amend and edit her youthful writings well into her thirties.5 Because she was writing for herself and her family, she allowed herself a lack of restraint unthinkable in the published novels. In this sense, the vellum notebooks give access to the authentic interior life of Jane Austen, free from the shackles of literary convention and the mask of respectability required by print. If the child is father to the man, as her contemporary William Wordsworth claimed, then the girl is mother to the woman. The not so secret life of Jane Austen aged eleven to seventeen is as a writer of wonderful exuberance and self-confidence. She also shows herself to be a young woman of firm opinions and strong passions.
A turning point was being allowed a room of her own. Shortly after Jane and Cassandra returned from boarding school for good in 1786 they were given the use of an upstairs drawing room, adjoining their bedroom. In her letters she referred to it as her Dressing Room. It had blue wallpaper and blue striped curtains and a chocolate-brown carpet. The room contained Jane’s piano and her writing desk. There was a bookcase and a table for the sisters’ workboxes.
Jane Austen was a supreme social satirist. Wit was valued highly in the Austen family. Most of the early stories are lampoons, burlesques or parodies. The point of such writing is that it copies or caricatures the style or spirit of serious works so as to excite laughter, often by ludicrous exaggeration. The great exemplar of the form in the eighteenth century was Henry Fielding, whose works Austen knew well. His Tragedy of Tragedies, or the History of Tom Thumb the Great was the classic burlesque of stage tragedy. The ‘great’ Tom Thumb is a heroic warrior who happens to be a midget. He is offered in marriage to the Princess Huncamunca, which makes Queen Dollalolla passionately jealous. Tom dies as a result of being swallowed by a cow, but his ghost returns. The ghost is put to death in turn and nearly all the rest of the cast kill each other in duels or take their own lives in grief. The young Jane Austen loved this sort of thing, and when she uses such names as Crankhumdunberry and Pammydiddle she is paying homage to Fielding.
Fielding’s great rival Samuel Richardson had pioneered the heroine-centred courtship novel when he published the smash hit Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Pamela is a lowly maidservant who refuses the sexual advances of her master, Mr B, and tames him by her virtue and religious principles into making her an offer of marriage. Fielding loathed the hypocrisy of the idea that the reward for virtue should be so patently material: marriage to a wealthy man with a large house. He responded with his lampoon Shamela, in which the heroine, far from being an innocent and virtuous victim, is a scheming unscrupulous hussy who entraps her master into marriage. Reading Shamela is like reading the original novel through a distorted mirror. In the original novel, Pamela is distressed by her master’s sexual advances, but in Fielding she is playing a long and sly game of sexual conquest:
He took me by the Hand, and I pretended to be shy: Laud, says I, Sir, I hope you don’t intend to be rude; no, says he, my Dear, and then he kissed me, ’till he took away my Breath – and I pretended to be Angry, and to get away, and then he kissed me again, and breathed very short, and looked very silly; and by Ill-Luck Mrs Jervis came in, and had like to have spoiled Sport. – How troublesome is such Interruption!6
Jane Austen loved to make her family laugh out loud when reading out her lampoons, but like Fielding she also approved of burlesque as a literary medium for exposing moral and social hypocrisy. And also like Fielding, she had a sharp eye for the absurdities and limitations of much of the fiction of her age.
The first story that she copied into her precious notebook was ‘Frederic and Elfrida’, a very funny parody of the sentimental novels of the day. For those who begin reading Jane Austen with Pride and Prejudice and come to the vellum notebooks only after the six mature novels, it is a disorienting experience to read ‘Frederic and Elfrida: a novel’. Early in the story comes the news that a new family has taken a house near by. Frederic, Elfrida and her friend Charlotte go to pay their respects. The arrivals in the neighbourhood are Mrs Fitzroy and her two daughters. The conversation initially turns on the relative merits of Indian and English muslins. So far, so Pride and Prejudice. But one of the sisters is beautiful and foolish, the other ugly and clever. In this topsy-turvy world it is the ugly and hump-backed Rebecca who garners the compliments: ‘Lovely and too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding Squint, your greazy tresses and your swelling Back, which are more frightfull than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the Horror with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor.’
