* Contains literary critiques, detailed biographies, and detailed historical context OVERVIEW This book collects together Jane's Austen's Juvenilia and Early Writings along with the biographical memoirs of Jane Austen by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. TABLE OF CONTENTS ————————————————— BIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE The Life and Legacy of Jane Austen A Chronology of Jane Austen’s Life JUVENALIA & MINOR WORKS LOVE AND FREINDSHIP THE BEAUTIFULL CASSANDRA AN UNFINISHED NOVEL IN LETTERS LESLEY CASTLE THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND A COLLECTION OF LETTERS SCRAPS THE FEMALE PHILOSOPHER A LETTER THE FIRST ACT OF A COMEDY A LETTER from a YOUNG LADY, whose feelings being too strong for A TOUR THROUGH WALES—in a LETTER from a YOUNG LADY A MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN DETAIL OF KEY WORKS - LOVE AND FREINDSHIP [sic] is a juvenile story by Jane Austen, dated 1790. Written in epistolary form, like her later unpublished novella, Lady Susan, Love and Freindship is thought to be one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family. The installments, written as letters from the heroine Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend, Isabel, "La Comtesse de Feuillide", may have come about as nightly readings by the young Jane in the Austen home. Love and Freindship (the misspelling is one of many in the story) is clearly a parody of romantic novels Austen read as a child. This is clear even from the subtitle, "Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love", which completely undercuts the title. In form, it resembles a fairy tale as much as anything else, featuring wild coincidences and turns of fortune, but Austen is determined to lampoon the conventions of romantic stories, right down to the utter failure of romantic fainting spells, which always turn out badly for the female characters. In this story one can see the development of Austen's sharp wit and disdain for romantic sensibility, so characteristic of her later novels. - THE BEAUTIFULL CASSANDRA [sic] is a short novel from Jane Austen's juvenilia. It is a parody of the melodramatic and sentimental novels of the time and tells the story of a young woman who sets off into the world to make her fortune. - THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND is a 1791 work by Jane Austen, written when the author was fifteen. It is a burlesque which pokes fun at widely used schoolroom history books such as Oliver Goldsmith's 1771 The History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II. Austen mockingly imitates the style of textbook histories of English monarchs, while ridiculing historians' pretensions to objectivity. Her History cites as sources fictional works such as the plays of Shakespeare and Sheridan, a novel by Charlotte Turner Smith and the opinions of Austen's family and friends. Along with accounts of English kings and queens which contain little factual information but a great deal of comically exaggerated opining about their characters and behaviour, the work includes material such as charades and puns on names. BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS OF JANE AUSTEN This Special Critical Edition of JANE AUSTEN'S JUVENILIA & EARLY WORKS (Cambridge World Classics) is the only volume which contains the complete unabridged novel along with A MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN a comprehensive biography of Jane Austen by Jane Austen's nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. A Memoir of Jane Austen was the first major biography of the novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817). A family project, the biography was written by James Edward Austen-Leigh but owed much to the recollections of Jane Austen's many relatives. SPECIAL KINDLE ENABLED This edition contains special Kindle enabled features, including interactive table of contents, text-to-speech capabilities which enable audiobook features, as well as words that can be looked up on the Kindle supplied built in dictionary. The volume also employs PerfectLink (TM) technology.