Jane Austen, Early and Late

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A reexamination of Austens unpublished writings that uncovers their continuity with her celebrated novelsand that challenges distinctions between her early and late work

Jane Austens six novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent a body of work that is as brilliant as it is compact. Her earlier writings have routinely been dismissed as mere juvenilia, or stepping stones to mature proficiency and greatness. Austens first biographer described them as childish effusions. Was he right to do so Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot.

Examining the three manuscript volumes in which Austen collected her earliest writings, Johnston finds that Austens regard and affection for them are revealed by her continuing to revisit and revise them throughout her adult life. The teenage works share the milieu and the humour of the novels, while revealing more clearly the sources and influences upon which Austen drew. Johnston upends the conventional narrative, according to which Austen discarded the satire and fantasy of her first writings in favour of the irony and realism of the novels. By demonstrating a stylistic and thematic continuity across the full range of Austens work, Johnston asks whether it makes sense to speak of an early and a late Austen at all.

Jane Austen, Early and Late offers a new picture of the author in all her complexity and ambiguity, and shows us that it is not necessarily true that early work yields to later, better things.

Reviews

"An A Kennedy Smith Book of the Year"
"Fans of Jane Austen will enjoy Freya Johnstons Jane Austen, Early and Late, which examines some of the teenage writings from the author of Pride and Prejudice, many of which were, surprisingly, full of gallows humour."---Martin Chilton, Independent
"If you know your Austen, this book is a dream."---Norma Clarke, Literary Review
"Austenites will appreciate the historical context Johnston provides. . . . Students and devotees of Austen will appreciate the light shed on a lesser-known part of her career." * Publishers Weekly *
"A wonderfully expansive reimagining of the corpus. . . . The great achievement of Johnstons book is putting us face-to-face with the writing itself: with the sheer compositional energy of Austens work."---Alex Woloch, Nineteenth-Century Contexts
"In a stream of perceptive and engaging close readings of Austens writing, the book insists on stylistic, thematic and conceptual connections not only between her juvenilia and published novels, but among all the authors written output. . . . Johnston also weaves into her analysis a stunning array of works that likely constituted Austens own reading."---Michelle Levy, Review of English Studies

Author Bio

Freya Johnston is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the coeditor of Jane Austens Teenage Writings and the author of Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 17091791.