Brotherly and Sisterly Dedications in Jane Austen's Juvenilia (AGM: 2009: Philadelphia) (Critical Essay‪)‬

JANE AUSTEN PRESERVED the writings of her childhood and youth in three manuscript notebooks, to which she gave the mock-solemn titles of "Volume the First," "Volume the Second," and "Volume the Third," as though collectively they formed a three-volume novel. All four of the novels that she published during her lifetime, from Sense and Sensibility in 1811 to Emma in 1815, appeared in just such a format. Despite this ostensible resemblance to her published works, however, Austen's juvenilia, written between about 1787 and 1798, differ from her full-length fiction in some obvious ways. First, the total length of the twenty-seven items in the three notebooks, some 74,000 words, is less than half that of either of her two longest novels, Mansfield Park and Emma, and considerably less than either Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, although close to that of the two posthumously published novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Second, unlike the numbered chapters that comprise the volumes of each of the novels, the various items in the notebooks are unnumbered and differ markedly in length: there are sixteen short pieces in "Volume the First," nine in "Volume the Second," including such substantial ones as "Love and Freindship" and "Lesley Castle," and only two in "Volume the Third," "Evelyn" and "Catharine, or the Bower." Another feature that distinguishes the juvenilia from five of the published novels is the presence of dedications to family members and close friends, strewn throughout the three manuscript volumes. Emma, of course, is the exception among the novels. Readers of the first edition, published in December 1815, would have been struck by its very formal dedication, immediately following the title page: