Clothbound Classics: Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings

Cover design by Coralie Bickford Smith

Jane Austen’s earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven years, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work. But it is also a product of the eighteenth century she grew up in – 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 mother’s fingers, and a letter-writer who has murdered her whole family all feature in these very funny pieces.

This edition includes all of Austen’s juvenilia, including her ‘History of England’ – written by ‘a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian’ – and the novella ‘Lady Susan’, in which the anti-heroine schemes and cheats her way through high society.