ABSTRACT
In the late 1780s, probably in 1787 when she was a child of 11, Jane Austen began writing a series of short stories, dramatic sketches, poems and miscellaneous items, including a parodic history of England. In 1922, when “Love and Freindship” and the other items in “Volume the Second” were first published, Austen’s stature as a child author was far more precarious. The preface to this edition, by G. K. Chesterton, made some strong claims for the significance of the juvenilia. Criticism of the juvenilia between the early 1950s, when the whole corpus was at last made available, and the late 1970s struggled to find ways to describe these unfamiliar writings. A turning-point in the reception of Austen’s juvenilia came in the late 1970s, when the early writings were taken up by feminist critics. By the end of the 1980s, the juvenilia, far from being an embarrassment for Austen’s critics, were seen as a fruitful field of enquiry.
