Abstract
Jane Austen’s juvenilia was preserved in three vellum notebooks, which contain final drafts of over twenty short stories, plays, letters, and scraps written between 1787 and 1793. As such, they offer a rare glimpse at the development of the aspiring young writer, documenting the evolution of Austen’s early writing style. The stories are burlesques of traditional themes from eighteenth-century literature, offering Austen’s readers her humorous perspective on the limiting conventions reinforced in popular novels and conduct books. While Austen loved reading novels, she was critical of depictions of sentimentalism and mocked the excessive emotion depicted in her favorite novels. This thesis provides an analysis of a sampling of stories from each of the three notebooks, including “Jack & Alice” from Volume the First, “Lesley Castle” from Volume the Second, and “Evelyn” from Volume the Third. Throughout my thesis I highlight allusions to numerous novels that appear in the juvenilia, suggesting that while Austen was a great lover of the novel, she was critical of the portrayals of men and women in popular literature. Ultimately, this essay will demonstrate that while the juvenilia is humorous on its surface, it reflects the anxiety and frustration Austen experienced as a young woman. Furthermore, because the stories were written for a private audience of close family and friends, who shared her disdain for sentimentality, the juvenilia represent Austen’s contribution to the criticism of novels and the societal limitations they reinforced. Through this lens, we can read Austen’s juvenilia as an uncensored rebellion against the limitations she experienced as a young woman both through the novels she loved and in her daily life.