By Devoney Looser, Arizona State University
Joyful drunkenness, serial gluttony, unpunished theft, and unabashed violence: These aren’t things most of us think of when we imagine Jane Austen’s fiction. And yet, they’re exactly what’s presented in her earliest writings, combined with the more expected themes of love, marriage, and money. However, Austen didn’t design these earliest writings for print publication.
Understanding Juvenilia
If one imagines Austen’s fiction as prim, proper prose, oozing with romance, then nothing will overturn that stereotype more quickly than learning about the body of work known as her juvenilia.
The term juvenilia refers to childhood or juvenile writings. Scholars have also called these works Austen’s ‘teenage writings’, although the concept of a teenager really didn’t exist in her day. What we think of today as the hallmarks of a passage into an adult life—full-time work, getting married—might have started in the 18th century as early as age 12, 13, or 14, with full-time work beginning even earlier for working-class children.
Remembering that fact can help us understand how it is that Austen could have written such sophisticated, comic things at that age. The historical and cultural difference don’t, however, explain how she was able to do it so stunningly well.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Life and Works of Jane Austen. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Austen’s Earliest Writing Process
These early works comprise some of Austen’s least-known writings, and there are only a few details available about how, where, and why these highly colorful works were first composed and revised. But what is known is that she obviously cared about them. She recopied these writings into neat, finished versions—called ‘fair copies’. They were recopied to be preserved and reread. Austen made corrections and changes to them. Several relatives even added to them and later set out to finish her early, incomplete texts.
This has led scholars to speculate that Austen’s earliest writing process may have involved family collaboration. At least one text in the juvenilia was done in partnership with her sister Cassandra. But all of the evidence suggests that Austen didn’t design these earliest writings for print publication. Still, that doesn’t mean they were exactly private writings.
It is not known how many people read or heard them, just that she apparently didn’t seek a mass audience for them. Most of the 27 separately titled pieces of the juvenilia weren’t published until the 20th century, more than a century after her death.
A Novel in Twelve Chapters
One of her earlier works, The Beautifull Cassandra, calls itself ‘a novel in twelve chapters’. In reality, it runs little more than 12 paragraphs.
This humorously miniaturized story follows its protagonist, Cassandra, through seven hours of her life’s adventures. Her birth is first described in the most ridiculous way possible. She’s called ‘noble’ for being descended from a ‘near relation’ of a Duchess’s butler.
Having dispensed in a sentence with the pretensions of a heroine’s good birth and breeding, the story further flouts the conventions of romance. Austen’s heroine falls immediately in love, not with a hero but “with an elegant Bonnet”, which she steals from her mother’s shop. Cassandra begins her day with thievery, but she graduates to gluttony, by devouring six ices at a pastry cook’s shop. Then there’s more theft, when she refuses to pay for them. She next takes a risky ride by herself in a hackney coach—a kind of taxi—and then forces her stolen bonnet onto the coachman’s head, in order to escape paying the fare in cash and making her getaway.
Hints of Unconventional Writing
The most surprising part of The Beautifull Cassandra occurs when the heroine confronts the man who would, in every other romance of the day, turn out to be her handsome hero. Cassandra meets a nobleman, a viscount, described as “a young man, no less celebrated for his Accomplishments and Virtues, than for his Elegance and Beauty.”
It is important to notice how the Viscount is described with words normally reserved for heroines—accomplishments, virtues, elegance, and beauty. Then, the narrator tells us, on meeting him, “She curtseyed and walked on.” Cassandra’s response is the exact opposite of what one would expect. She ignores the handsome young man.
The heroine gorges on sweets, commits violence and theft, doesn’t fall in love, and walks away from it all, unscathed and unpunished. The action of the story isn’t just improbable; it’s wildly and hilariously ludicrous. In The Beautifull Cassandra, the usual features of romance novels are overturned. They’ve run amok. Each of the parts of a romance is introduced, but nothing is as it should be.
This is typical of the raw energy and knowing, off-color comedy that Austen combines in her earliest writings.
Common Questions about Jane Austen, Juvenilia, and ‘The Beautifull Cassandra’
The term juvenilia refers to childhood or juvenile writings. Scholars have also called these works Jane Austen’s ‘teenage writings’, although the concept of a teenager really didn’t exist in her day.
Jane Austen‘s work The Beautifull Cassandra calls itself ‘a novel in twelve chapters’. In reality, it runs little more than 12 paragraphs. This humorously miniaturized story follows its protagonist, Cassandra, through seven hours of her life’s adventures.
In some of Jane Austen‘s early writing, she made corrections and changes. Several relatives even added to them and later set out to finish her early, incomplete texts. This has led scholars to speculate that Austen’s earliest writing process may have involved family collaboration. At least one text in the juvenilia was done in partnership with her sister Cassandra.
