For the first time, all three volumes of Jane Austen's brilliant early manuscripts are available in in beautiful facsimile editions. Forever immortalized as the author of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen actually produced her first "books" as a teenager. Taking their names from the inscriptions on their covers Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third these brilliant little collections include the stories, playlets, verses, and moral fragments she wrote likely from the ages of twelve to eighteen. 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 plot lines and characters. Kathryn Sutherland, in her introductions, 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. None of her six famous novels survives in complete manuscript form. This is a unique opportunity to own likenesses of Jane Austen's notebooks as originally written in her own hand. The In Her Own Hand series boxed set contains facsimile editions of Jane Austen's fiction, in her handwriting. The books include transcriptions by R. W. Chapman first recorded in 1953.
