ABSTRACT
Jane Austen’s short fiction surprises most readers, who usually discover her youthful pieces when they continue their search for more Austen to read after the six novels. Instead of finding the subtlety, restraint, and understatement of her mature works, they are startled to find, as Juliet McMaster puts it in “The Short Fiction: Energy Versus Sympathy,” “boisterous overstatement [which] is not just over the top, but down the other side too” (175). McMaster also notices that “the young Jane Austen was still relatively free of gendered identity, and she presents characters who are similarly unsocialized” (176). Victorian relatives of Jane Austen hesitated at publishing these, for them, faintly embarrassing, albeit exuberant, youthful pieces.1 Other readers, such as novelist Reginald Hill, believe that the short fiction is the lens through which to read all of Jane Austen’s later work properly.2
