18th Century Titles

Jane Austen's Men

Rakes, fools, takers, losers: in these four brief tales featuring male protagonists, young Jane Austen’s men fall victim to her fierce feminist pen.

Edited by Sylvia Hunt and others with illustrations by Juliet McMaster

Jane Austen's Three Mini–Dramas

Jane Austen became a novelist, not a playwright. But her engagement with the stage in these three mini-dramas shows a wonderfully inventive response to the theatre of her time, and a sportive demonstration that she too can handle a scene and present character through dialogue.

Edited by Juliet McMaster, Lesley Peterson and others with illustrations by Juliet McMaster, Zoe Share and Allison Yung

Jane Austen's Lady Susan

Lady Susan is Jane Austen’s depiction of the attraction of evil. Written when the author was nineteen, this early letter novel is a brilliantly cynical study of high society. In Lady Susan we experience the malicious wit and energy of the early writings and glimpse the polish and sophistication of her later novels.

Edited by Christine Alexander and David Owen.

Jane Austen's A Collection of Letters

This young author revels in a youthful, uncensored pleasure in wild exaggerations of literary conventions, but is moving, nonetheless, towards a more intricate and cautious mode of story-telling which details the realities of domestic lives and social manners.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others.

Jane Austen's Amelia Webster and The Three Sisters

A minimalist epistolary romance, and a wicked take-off of sisterly rivalry. In this little edition of two of Jane Austen's juvenilia, probably written at ages 12 and 15, the young novelist turns the spotlight on both the possibilities and the absurdities of the epistolary mode.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others.

Jane Austen's Catharine or the Bower

Appearing in Jane Austen's third and final "Volume" of juvenile works, Catharine is far more than the "Effusions of Fancy by a very Young Lady." … Rather, it is an ambitious attempt at serious fiction that marks a significant transitional point in Austen's development as a writer.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others.

Jane Austen's Evelyn

Evelyn depicts a voracious hero who gets everything and keeps wanting more. Writing at about age 16, Jane Austen explores the disparity between her hero's exhilarating freedom from social constraints and her own necessary compliance with the demands of a rigidly ordered society, between a fictive superabundance of food, money and accommodation and the realities of everyday life in the Austen household, with its restrained gentility and plainly limited resources.

Edited by Peter Sabor and others.

Jane Austen's Frederic & Elfrida

A humorous crash course in conventional novel patterns and the intricacies of "Propriety." We see in it besides the young author's purposeful carving away of the novelist she will not be, and her early shaping of the novelist she will become.

Edited by Peter Sabor, Sylvia Hunt, and Victoria Kortes-Papp.

Jane Austen's Henry and Eliza

Written by Jane Austen at age 12, 13, or 14, Henry and Eliza turns the story of the traditional novel heroine on its head as Eliza lives out the traditional male adventure -- she leaves her family, travels, faces danger, demonstrates cunning and bravery, and defeats her enemies in armed battle. Only in the juvenilia would Jane Austen allow her heroine a hero's rewards...

Edited by Karen L. Hartnick with Rachel M. Brownstein and others.

Jane Austen's Jack & Alice: A Novel

Written by Jane Austen when only 13 or 14 years old, this outrageous tale features a boozy heroine and a stunningly handsome hero. Behind all the exuberant madness of Jack & Alice is a teenager of genius who revels in the ridiculous and dearly loves the game of words.

Edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth and others.

Jane Austen's Lesley Castle

In Lesley Castle, the teenage Jane Austen sets up Gothic expectations which she then wickedly subverts. This outrageously funny fiction has enough plot for two or three novels: an adulterous elopement, divorce and remarriage, a bridegroom's fatal riding accident before his wedding, and an elderly father's sudden remarriage to a much younger woman ...

Edited by Jan Fergus and others.

Jane Austen's Love and Freindship

A young genius gloriously and uninhibitedly letting her hair down, piling joke upon joke, hyperbole on hyperbole ... a resounding parody of the novel of sensibility ... hilarious burlesque. Love and Freindship is arguably the funniest short work of fiction in the English language.

Edited by Juliet McMaster and others.

Jane Austen's The Beautifull Cassandra
(published by Sono Nis Press but marketed by permission with other Austen titles by the Juvenilia Press)

A delightful story about a pleasure-loving young female who falls in love with a bonnet and braves the world. Written by Jane Austen when she was probably only twelve, The Beautifull Cassandra is now brought to us as a full-colour picture book by Juliet McMaster, who envisages the characters as small animals in eighteenth-century clothing, in the manner of Beatrix Potter.

Edited by Juliet McMaster

Jane Austen's The History of England

Written by a self-styled "partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian" at age 15, this is an outrageous parody of the schoolroom history book. Here the youthful Jane Austen and her sister (age 18) make sure more women are included, and cheerfully get revenge on conventional histories which chronicle only "the quarrels of popes and kings."

With illustrations by Cassandra Austen

Edited by Jan Fergus and others.

Jane Austen's The Three Sisters

Mr Watts is a single man in possession of a good fortune who is in want of a wife, and Mrs Stanhope is mother of a family of girls who is very much in want of a son-in-law. This satiric narrative of courtship and self-interest by the young Jane Austen reads like a humorous trial run for Pride and Prejudice.

Edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth, Laura Maestrelli and Kristin Smith; with illustrations by Juliet McMaster.

Lady Mary Pierrepont (later Montagu)'s Indamora to Lindamira

A charming and funny story of love and honour, hitherto unpublished. The world of Lady Mary's Indamora is one of youthful optimism. It is a dangerous place of duels, shipwrecks, and sudden mortal diseases, but you can count on these disasters leaving the good untouched.

Edited by Isobel Grundy.

Lady Mary Pierrepont (later Montagu)'s The Adventurer

A romance in prose and verse about the hero's eventful but fruitless visit to the Isle of Love. In this allegorical tale, the 14-year-old Lady Mary Pierrepont expresses all the jaded wisdom of a writer with absolutely no romantic experience. The result is one of the most captivating epistolary romances of 1704, never before available in print.

Edited by Isobel Grundy and others.

Anna Maria Porter's Artless Tales

A series of highly decorative tales of love and war, crusades and witchcraft, lovely ladies, handsome knights, and a cross-dresser or two, by a girl who managed to publish at 13.

Edited by Juliet McMaster, Leslie Robertson, and others.