Jane Austen"s brilliant, hilarious - and often outrageous - early stories, sketches and pieces of nonsense, in a beautiful Penguin Classics clothbound edition. Jane Austen"s earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven years, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work: wit, acute insight into human folly, and a preoccupation with manners, morals and money. But they are also a product of the eighteenth century she grew up in - dark, grotesque, often surprisingly bawdy, and a far cry from the polished, sparkling novels of manners for which she became famous. Drunken heroines, babies who bite off their mother"s fingers, and a letter-writer who has murdered her whole family all feature in these very funny pieces. This edition includes all of Austen"s juvenilia, including her "History of England" - written by "a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian" - and the novella "Lady Susan", in which the anti-heroine schemes and cheats her way through high society. Taken...