The young Jane Austen was a precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature, both of which she soon began to imitate and parody. Three volumes of her vivacious teenage writing survive. Devices and themes which appear subtly in her later fiction run riot here: drunkenness, brawling, sexual misdemeanour, theft, and even murder.

2017 is the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death.Compared to previous editions of her early works, Jane Austen's Teenage Writings contextualises them more fully as a collection within the novelist's wider oeuvre.The new edition provides fresh readings of individual texts, suggesting the need for different editorial protocols.Full Textual and Explanatory Notes accompany Teenage Writings, offering a comprehensive re-appraisal of their sophisticated relationship to their sources. The Explanatory Notes expand our sense of what the young Austen might have been reading and responding to.The text presented here of 'Kitty, or the Bower' offers the reader the first opportunity, other than that granted to Jane Austen's immediate family, to read her story as she wrote it - and before the next generation set about its revision and amelioration.The text restores Austen's many distinctive and quirky abbreviations as they appear in the early works.This edition includes a Chronology of Composition, a Note on Spelling, a Note on the Text, and two maps to assist the reader - one of locations in Great Britain (real and fictional) mentioned by Austen, and one of late eighteenth-century London.

Kathryn Sutherland is Professor of Bibliography & Textual Criticism in the University of Oxford. She is the editor of James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections for Oxford World's Classics. She has created a digital edition of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts (2010), the print edition of which is due to be published by OUP in 2017. She is the author of Jane Austen's Textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (OUP, 2005). Freya Johnston is University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in English at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is the author of Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709-1791 (2005) and general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (2016 - ).

2017 is the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death. Compared to previous editions of her early works, Jane Austen's Teenage Writings contextualizes them more fully as a collection within the novelist's wider oeuvre. The new edition provides fresh readings of individual texts, suggesting the need for different editorial protocols. Full Textual and Explanatory Notes accompany Teenage Writings, offering a comprehensive re-appraisal of their sophisticated relationship to their sources. The Explanatory Notes expand our sense of what the young Austen might have been reading and responding to. The text presented here of 'Kitty, or the Bower' offers the reader the first opportunity, other than that granted to Jane Austen's immediate family, to read her story as she wrote it - and before the next generation set about its revision and amelioration. The text restores Austen's many distinctive and quirky abbreviations as they appear in the early works. This edition includes a Chronology of Composition, a Note on Spelling, a Note on the Text, and two maps to assist the reader - one of locations in Great Britain (real and fictional) mentioned by Austen, and one of late eighteenth-century London.