Volume the First by Jane Austen ― In Her Own Hand

Facsimile of teen-age Jane Austen's brilliant first manuscript is now available.

Forever immortalized as the author of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen actually produced her first ?book” as a teenager, Volume the First. Taking its name from the inscription on the cover, this brilliant little collection includes the stories, playlets, verses, and moral fragments she wrote likely from ages twelve to eighteen. The volume was produced for the enjoyment of her family and close friends?entertaining it was and is!

Now it is available for all of us to see.

As a young author, Jane Austen delighted in language, employing it with great humor and surprising skill. She was adept at parodying the popular stories of her day and entertained her readers with outrageous plotlines and characters. Kathryn Sutherland’s introduction places Austen’s earliest works in context and explains how she mimicked even the style and manner in which this contemporary popular fiction was presented and arranged on the page. The work of a young adult, Volume the First nevertheless reveals the development of the unmistakable voice and style that would mark her as one of the most popular authors of all time. None of her six famous novels survives in manuscript. This is a unique opportunity to own a likeness of Jane Austen’s hand in the form of a complete manuscript facsimile.

Jane Austen, perhaps best known as the author of Pride and Prejudice, is one of the most beloved novelists in the English language. She lived all her life in England and died at the age of forty-one, leaving a literary legacy hard to match by any author before or since.

Kathryn Sutherland is Professor of Bibliography & Textual Criticism, University of Oxford. She is the author of Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood and is the editor of the Digital Edition of Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts.