Jane Austen, Early and Late
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
A reexamination of Austen’s unpublished writings that uncovers their continuity with her celebrated novels—and that challenges distinctions between her “early” and “late” work
Jane Austen’s 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. Austen’s 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 Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works?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 Austen’s 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 Austen’s 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jane Austen's early works, often thought to be "childish effusions," take center stage in this original survey from St. Anne's College lecturer Johnston (Samuel Johnson). Johnston challenges the conventional theory that Austen's juvenilia, written from 1787 to 1793, was simply a stepping stone to her novels. In fact, a clear delineation between early and late work faces knotty problems, she suggests, given that Austen returned to and revised her works throughout her life. The "ferocious parodic and observational bite" of Austen's writerly beginnings stayed with her, Johnston writes, but by the time of her "mature" novels, changes in reader taste "weakened" the salability of edgy satire and led to softer prose. Johnston sometimes veers off on tangents, homing in, for example, on the change in later editions of the word innocent to ignorant in a passage from Pride and Prejudice (her sister's suggestion). At the same time, Austenites will appreciate the historical context Johnston provides, such as Austen's brother Frank's views of slavery in Antigua, her family's annotations of Goldsmith's History of England, and the meaning of her final poem on St. Swithin. Students and devotees of Austen will appreciate the light shed on a lesser-known part of her career.
