Lesley Castle

Jane Austen

Before Pride and Prejudice, a teenage Jane Austen was already taking aim. Scribblings collects the work that bookends her career: the riotous juvenilia she wrote to make her family laugh — lovers fainting alternately on a sofa, a History of England by “a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian” — alongside the two novels she began and never finished. She set The Watsons aside around 1805; Sanditon was cut short by her final illness in 1817. Together they are Austen unguarded: the first jokes and the last pages. The Watsons appears here in the 1923 edition in which L. Oulton carried Austen’s fragment through to an ending; the preface is by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh.