Most readers come to Jane Austen through the beloved novels of her maturity — the sparkling wit of Pride and Prejudice, the quiet moral precision of Persuasion. But tucked behind those masterworks lies a treasure trove of earlier writing that reveals something extraordinary: a young woman teaching herself, with remarkable speed and confidence, to become one of literature's greatest novelists. Her juvenilia and the epistolary novella Lady Susan offer devoted fans and curious newcomers alike a rare glimpse into the workshop where genius was made.
Written around 1794 when Austen was approximately eighteen or nineteen, Lady Susan is unlike anything else in her canon. Told entirely through a series of letters, it follows the scheming, spectacularly unmaternal Lady Susan Vernon — a widow of breathtaking beauty and absolutely flexible morality who manipulates every man in her orbit while treating her own daughter with open contempt. She is, in short, a villain, and Austen renders her with undisguised delight.
What makes Lady Susan so fascinating is how fully Austen inhabits this morally bankrupt character. There is no reassuring narrative voice standing outside the letters to reassure us that virtue will prevail. Lady Susan writes her own story, and she writes it brilliantly. Reading her scheming correspondence, we sense Austen testing the limits of her chosen form — asking how far she could go, how dark a heroine she could create, before pulling back into the safer territory of her mature novels. The answer, it seems, was quite far indeed.
The epistolary structure itself rewards close attention. Austen uses the letter format to exploit gaps between what characters say and what they mean, between what they reveal to one correspondent and conceal from another. It is a masterclass in dramatic irony, and you can see the seeds of Elizabeth Bennet's misreadings and Emma Woodhouse's self-deceptions already germinating in this slim, underappreciated work.
Even earlier than Lady Susan, Austen filled three notebooks — preserved today as Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third — with burlesques, mock histories, comic plays, and satirical fiction written between roughly ages eleven and seventeen. These pieces, collectively known as the juvenilia, are among the most joyful and surprising documents in English literary history.
The standout piece is Love and Freindship (note the deliberately misspelled title, a joke in itself), written at age fourteen and addressed with mock solemnity to a family friend. It is a merciless parody of the sentimental novels flooding the market in the 1790s, in which heroines faint decorously at moments of distress and prize sensibility above all earthly goods. Austen's heroines faint so frequently and so competitively that one of them dies of it. The comedy is broad, confident, and wickedly perceptive — not the work of a tentative child but of someone who had already read widely and thought hard about what fiction could and could not honestly do.
Other juvenilia gems include The History of England, a gleefully biased romp through British history illustrated by Austen's sister Cassandra, and Catharine, or the Bower, a longer, more serious piece that begins to approach the emotional complexity of the mature novels. Reading these works in sequence, you can almost chart the emergence of Austen's distinctive voice — the dry irony, the precise social observation, the deep respect for intelligent women — piece by piece.
Whit Stillman's 2016 film Love & Friendship — confusingly titled after the juvenilia story but actually based on Lady Susan — introduced the novella to a wide new audience and remains one of the most faithful and witty adaptations of any Austen work. Kate Beckinsale's performance as Lady Susan is a revelation: playful, ice-cold, and utterly irresistible. If you have seen the film and not yet read the source text, do yourself the pleasure of reading the original letters alongside it. You will find the film's best lines lifted almost verbatim from Austen's pages.
Reading Austen's juvenilia and Lady Susan enriches every other novel she wrote. You begin to see Northanger Abbey as a more polished extension of those early parodies, and Mansfield Park's moral seriousness as a conscious counterweight to Lady Susan's glittering amorality. Most importantly, these early works remind us that Austen was not simply born perfect. She practiced, she experimented, she laughed at her own literary culture, and she grew. Following that growth is one of the deepest pleasures available to any reader who loves her work.