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Austen Chat: Episode 27

September 4, 2025

 

Jane Austen & Her Teenage Writings: A Visit with Lesley Peterson

Jane Austen's Volume the First

"She has many rare & charming qualities, but Sobriety is not one of them."  —Jane Austen, Jack and Alice

Drunken brawls. Cannibalism. Heroines behaving very badly. Such mayhem may seem worlds apart from the sedate drawing rooms of Austen's novels, but it is par for the course in her teenage writings. In this episode, we welcome Lesley Peterson for an exploration of the whimsical world of Austen's juvenilia—the hilarious and often absurd stories she penned in her youth. Along the way, we’ll see how young Jane, growing up in a lively, intellectual household, was already testing boundaries and sharpening the wit that would one day captivate readers everywhere.

Lesley Peterson is the editor of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies and, before her retirement, was Professor of English at the University of North Alabama. She has published numerous articles in JASNA’s journals, Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line, and is a frequent presenter at JASNA's Annual General Meetings. In 2024, she served as a JASNA Traveling Lecturer and was awarded a fellowship through the JASNA International Visitor Program.

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Lesley for joining us on Austen Chat!

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Credits: From JASNA's Austen Chat podcast. Published September 4, 2025. © Jane Austen Society of North America. All rights reserved. Photo by Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash. Theme Music: Country Dance by Humans Win.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn Wood: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to Austen Chat, a podcast brought to you by the Jane Austen Society of North America. I'm your host, Breckyn Wood from the Georgia Region of JASNA. As many of you know by now, 2025 marks Jane Austen's 250th birthday, which means we're celebrating her life and legacy all year long. For today's episode, we're going to do that by talking about Austen's juvenilia—her writings from when she was a teenager. Because even at a very young age, Austen was already displaying signs of her brilliance as a writer. I've mentioned the juvenilia multiple times on the podcast already because it's hilarious and completely bonkers, and I love it. If you've read the stories, you know what I'm talking about, and my guest today will have many interesting insights to share with us about them. If you haven't read them yet, maybe our conversation will encourage you to give them a try. My guest for this episode is Lesley Peterson. Lesley is the editor of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, and, before her retirement, was Professor of English at the University of North Alabama. She has published several papers in JASNA's journals, is a frequent presenter at JASNA AGMs, and in 2024, she was a JASNA Traveling Lecturer as well as the recipient of a fellowship under the JASNA International Visitor Program. Welcome to the show, Lesley.

Lesley Peterson: Hi. Thank you. I'm really, really excited to be here, and I can't imagine a better audience to have for our conversation. It's an honor to have this opportunity to speak to such a great group of people.

Breckyn: It's always fun to talk to JASNA people because you can just hit the ground running with Jane Austen stuff. So to start off, we're going to play an Austen version of Would You Rather? Today, it's the Battle of the Hypochondriacs. Lesley, would you rather have Mr. Woodhouse for a father or Mary Musgrove for a sister?

Lesley: I think I would rather have Mary Musgrove for a sister because I could leave her house.

Breckyn: Okay. You could escape her.

Lesley: I could escape her. Mr. Woodhouse is easier to love, for sure. But he's a job.

Breckyn: A full-time one, for sure.

Lesley: A full-time job with no retirement date in sight.

Breckyn: That's a good point. I think Mr. Woodhouse is slightly less annoying; Mary Musgrove sets my teeth on edge. But you're right, you can get away from Mary Musgrove a little more easily. Okay. So Lesley, let's dive in. For listeners who aren't familiar with the juvenilia, can you give us an introduction to them? How old was Austen when she started writing them? What are some of the main stories? Things like that.

Lesley: Right. Oh, that's great. Most of the juvenilia are collected in three manuscript notebooks. And the stories—they're mostly stories, some poems, some plays—were written probably starting around 1787. And since her birthday is in December, as we all know, she would have been 11 for most of that year. The great majority of the pieces in those manuscript notebooks were written between about 1788 and 1792. That seems to have been a period of real flourishing for her talent. She also wrote Lady Susan in 1794, so she would have been 18 then, and it's not collected in the manuscript notebooks. It's an unfinished epistolary novel. Well, it is finished, but the author wraps it all up with a very short narrative at the end. And her family referred to that as an "in-betweenity."

Breckyn: I haven't heard that word before. That's fun.

Lesley: Isn't it a beautiful word? Yes, Lady Susan is an in-betweenity, not totally childish, still in many ways a work of apprenticeship, but also still in other ways showing the fearlessness, the take-no-prisoners attitude towards both literary texts and human nature that characterize the juvenilia. And then the other work of her youth that is not collected in the manuscript notebooks is Sir Charles Grandison. Although it is mostly in her handwriting, the authorship has been challenged for reasons I could get into, but we probably don't need to now. But it's a five-act play based on the most interesting events of an incredibly long seven-volume novel by Richardson. And she wrote the first act around 1792. So again, during the height of her youthful powers when she would have been 16. But then she put it aside and didn't complete it until about the year 1800, by which time she was no longer technically a youth. She was around 22 at that time.

Breckyn: Yeah, and so—sorry, I was just going to say something about the juvenilia is that they're not these secret diaries that she's writing, right? She's explicitly dedicating them to specific members of her family. Clearly, they're passing them around, reading them aloud, maybe they're acting them out, like the play that you mentioned. Jane Austen, even from—starting from age 11, she's like, "I'm going to be the greatest writer that the world has ever seen, and here I am, world." And I just love that. She wanted an audience, and she was writing for an audience from the very beginning.

Lesley: I completely agree. And I think there's been more and more recognition of that element of her childhood in recent years. She grew up in a house full of other young people, mostly boys, because she had one sister, a whole ton of brothers, as well as students who came to board for her father to tutor. And the dirty jokes, the broad humor that teenage boys then, as now, really enjoyed—that's part of her world. That's part of her context. She doesn't write for just anybody, though. And I think that's also part of the explanation for the exuberance of her early work—because she knows she can trust this audience to be supportive, to enter into the fun. She knows that they've read many of the same works that she is satirizing and having fun with, so they're getting the jokes. And it's an incredibly supportive social network that she is writing within. And then she had her parents' support—at least her father's—because one of the notebooks has written in Latin that it's a gift from her father. So, she knows that her parents know that she's writing, and they're encouraging her in this very tangible way.

Breckyn: I want to go back to the earthiness of the juvenilia. You sort of mentioned that. I didn't really think about the influence of all the boys in the house. I sort of picture Jane Austen writing quietly in a corner in her mid-30s, and that's the Austen that I think of. But you get a whole new side of her if you read the juvenilia and these earthy, bawdy, silly jokes, inside jokes. It definitely seems like, like you said, she's writing for an audience that she trusts and that she knows really well. So, I think some people who read the juvenilia, they might be shocked by how crazy or exaggerated they are compared to Austen's carefully crafted, mature novels. But what are your thoughts on that? How did teenage Austen, who loved to write about drunken brawls, become the much more controlled, introspective Austen that we know?

Lesley: Well, she had to tame her style down in order to appeal to a larger market. A lot of her maturation is developing her craft for sure, and getting more confident and competent in her skills. But it's also a matter of figuring out who will publish and who will buy her books, and what she has to do in order to get read. You mentioned Mary Musgrove and Mr. Woodhouse earlier. And Mr. Collins is another example of one of the characters in her mature novels whom we love to laugh at, and there are—they could easily be caricatures. You wouldn't have to push Mr. Woodhouse very far or Mr. Collins very much further for them to start looking like some of the really exaggerated caricatures that we have in the juvenilia. So her keen eye for human absurdity never leaves her. She tones it down, but if you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, if you're one of those sharp elves, as opposed to the dull elves for whom, as she says, she does not write, then you're still going to really be laughing. John Thorpe is another example. He's not that different from some of the irresponsible, self-centered young men we meet in some of her very earliest pieces.

Breckyn: I have found, even in Janeite circles, that Northanger Abbey, I think, doesn't get as much love as it deserves. Even from a young age, I always loved it. I thought it was hilarious. It made me laugh out loud. And it didn't seem dissonant to me with the rest of her work. But I think some people who really prefer Emma or her more mature novels think that Northanger Abbey is kind of this aberration. But I think if you read the juvenilia, Northanger Abbey becomes a clear link between the juvenilia and her modern novels.

Lesley: I think that's—I would completely agree. I'd say that's very well put. But that's not to say that we need to lump it with Lady Susan as a "quote, unquote" in-betweenity. It's still a very complex and sophisticated work, but it's more obviously a satire of a particular genre, and that's something that we see in the juvenilia a lot. Being able to satirize something is one really good way of proving to yourself that you really understand it. So, I think that's a useful way of approaching the juvenilia is, if she's satirizing, for example, in Love and Freindship—which is deservedly famous, it's probably the best known of her youthful works—that's a satire of, among many other things, the epistolary sentimental novel. Having satirized that genre, she's proven that she can do it and undo it, or undercut it, at the same time. She's both celebrating and dismissing at the same time this genre. By the time she's finished writing Love and Freindship, maybe she's done with the epistolary novel in some ways, and doesn't need to keep writing that same satire over and over.

Breckyn: Yeah. And then she takes that satyric knife that she's sharpened and she points it at Gothic novels, which is what she then does in Northanger Abbey so well.

Lesley: But then she does that as well in Lesley Castle, which is an unfinished Gothic epistolary novel that is in volume ll of the juvenilia. And it was finished, I think, around 1790, 17... I should know that off the top of my head, but I don't.

Breckyn: It's the one named after you, Lesley.

Lesley: Exactly! So it ought to be. They even spelled the name right. It's part of that real—that peak period of her writing; right around 1789 to '91 was when a lot of them were getting done. And it prepares us in some ways for Northanger Abbey.

Breckyn: Well, so we touched on this a little bit, but I want to ask you more specifically. So, Austen—she's so experimental in the juvenilia; she's pushing as many boundaries as she can, as far as she can. Can you give some examples of the way that Austen is playing with literary conventions? I love what you said about—in order to satirize something, you actually have know it really well. She knows these inside and out. She has consumed these novels whole, clearly, and so she can deconstruct them. So, what are some other examples of that? What are some literary forms she's playing with?

Lesley: Okay. Well, some of the literary forms are conventions of certain types of characters. The masculine hero, the unbelievably perfect hero that we find in her favorite novel, Sir Charles Grandison, shows up in Jack and Alice. It's one of her—one of the longest of her early works, and it's one I keep coming back to over and over. And Sir Charles Grandison shows up early in the novel at a masquerade ball, and he has disguised himself as the sun. And he is so glittering and gleaming with the beams that radiate from him that nobody can look at him.

Breckyn: Except for eagles, right? Only eagles can look at him.

Lesley: Could look him in the face, yes. So, there she is showing her expert knowledge of and her impatience with the perfect hero or heroine that she met in so much of the more didactic or sentimental fiction that she was reading in her youth and that she is done with. There are no pictures of perfection in her mature novels.

Breckyn: Yeah, everyone's really nuanced and complicated. No one is wholly good or wholly bad, except for, I will always say, Mrs. Norris. She's just of the devil; she's an evil, evil woman. But everybody else is nuanced.

Lesley: Yes, yes, she is. Yeah, I don't know if that's the best example, but we may come back to others. I'll let you go on to your next question.

Breckyn: Well, no, sure. Yeah, and I actually—I want to read a quote real quick. So if people are looking to read the juvenilia, there's lots of it free online because it's in the public domain. The edition that I have is the Oxford World's Classics edition that was edited by Kathryn Sutherland and Freya Johnston. It's comprehensive. It has so many explanatory notes, and it's great. I just wanted to read a line from Kathryn Sutherland because she sort of asks the same question of like, "What are the boundaries that Austen is pushing?" She says, "Do characters in fiction need to be believable? Do actions need motives? Must a named hero appear in his own story?" Because she has the story—is it Jack and Alice?

Lesley: It is Jack and Alice. We never meet Jack.

Breckyn: Also, Edgar and Emma. Edgar never shows up. And he just like, you know—and so, "What does it mean for a dedication to be longer than the tale that follows? How spare, elliptical, and empty can a story be and still be comprehensible?" And so, like that youthful exuberance of where she's just like tearing stuff apart and then building it back together, patching it back together in whatever way excites or interests her. And it is a little crazy, and I think it's not to everyone's taste, but I think if you're a true hardcore Austenite, at some point, you have to read the juvenilia.

Lesley: Absolutely. And some of the characters are just so outrageous in the way they speak and in the way they act. For instance, again in Jack and Alice is a character called Lady Williams, who gives absolutely incomprehensible, garbled, contradictory advice that you really can't tell whether she is deliberately manipulating people, playing with their minds, making them vulnerable so she could control them with this kind of almost gaslighting behavior, or if she's just really stupid and can't—you know, doesn't even realize how contradictory she is. So she's really fun as a character, but she's also—because these speeches that she makes are just so ridiculous and—a young woman of her acquaintance writes to her and asks her if she should marry this hideous, old, wealthy aristocrat, and Lady Williams says, "Oh, you mustn't go to him because he's so horrible, but think how happily you will spend his money." So, she's contradicting herself constantly. But she's not only satirizing that kind of person who is maybe so full of herself that she thinks she's a lot smarter than she is, but she's also satirizing whole genres. Again, there's the discourse of advice—A Father's Advice to his Daughters and all of these things that young people like Jane Austen were reading that give young women advice on how to behave. And so that's being personified here in this absolutely horrible person.

Breckyn: Yeah, and isn't like the—I think people will know Fordyce's Sermons because that's what Mr. Collins insists on reading to the Bennet sisters—isn't the subtitle of that like, Advice for Young Ladies or something like that?

Lesley: I think so, yes.

Breckyn: So it's a popular genre of the time. Very didactic and finger wagging.

Lesley: At the same time, it can be very, very contradictory. Some of these books are—you'd have to tie yourself into knots to try to do all of the things that you're supposed to do to be a good young lady. So, what she's doing with Lady Williams, perhaps, is just making those contradictions really, really obvious and inescapable.

Breckyn: I love that. Something that I really enjoy when I read these stories is how often I would see little hints and glimmers of the mature novels. All over the margins of my copy, I have characters' names written because you can find prototypes of Lady Catherine or Mr. Woodhouse or Marianne Dashwood. So, where do you see intimations of Austen's mature novels?

Lesley: Ahhh. Well, let's go back to Love and Freindship, and you've already mentioned a number of good ones. But the narrator of Love and Freindship, Laura, is someone who believes very strongly in the value of reading novels, especially sentimental novels, and has tried to live her life according to what she has read in these novels. So, she's very much a forerunner of Catherine Morland, and—

Breckyn: And Marianne. I thought you were going to say Marianne Dashwood.

Lesley: Well, yes, absolutely. But Catherine and Marianne are much more sympathetic. They're much more well-rounded, but we still have that awareness of the tremendous temptation of the power over our imaginations of the narratives that we read, and the danger that that power can wield. And if we're going to say that the juvenilia are really unrealistic, I think one of the functions of that is to invite us to consider whether things that we thought were realistic maybe aren't.

Breckyn: Can I share—let's see, I have a line from—so, you'll see whole characters that I think are very similar to the mature. But then you'll see a line and you're like, "Oh, my gosh. It's like she copied and pasted that one particular line and then plopped it into one of the novels." So when I came across this—I don't even remember what—I didn't write down what story it was from, but a character is saying, "Let me warn you against suffering yourselves to be meanly swayed by the follies and vices of others." I was like, "Oh, that's verbatim. Mr. Darcy says that phrase." And I love that it comes—she was like, "You know what? That's a good line, me." She's like quoting herself years later. "I'm going to save that one for later." So, I really like that. And then in A Collection of Letters—it's the name of one of the stories—there's this Catherine de Bourgh character who makes Maria stand out by her ladyship's coach, "though the wind was extremely high and very cold." And again, Miss de Bourgh does that to Charlotte Lucas, or Charlotte Collins, in Pride and Prejudice. And so, I think those are just fun little Easter eggs to come across as an Austen fan.

Lesley: Yeah, I completely agree. To that wonderful list I would add the priest in her play, Sir Charles Grandison, who is in some ways a precursor of Mr. Collins—different from him in interesting ways as well. But Mr. Collins is not the first clergyman she has described in ways that make him seem quite, shall we say, unpalatable.

Breckyn: What are—so, I think Sir Charles Grandison might not even be in this copy.

Lesley: It isn't. It is not. It's not in any of the anthologies.

Breckyn: Is it because the authorship is sort of—

Lesley: Has been challenged, yes. It is in the Cambridge edition, The Complete Works of Jane Austen, but it's in the volume on her manuscript works, and it's been relegated to the position of appendix on the grounds of it being questioned. But it is in her handwriting. And, although some people think that her niece Anna wrote it or dictated it to her aunt Jane to write down, the first act was written around 1792, which was before Anna had even been born. And it's in Jane Austen's—Brian Southam dated it to that time based on the handwriting, which is definitely the teenage Jane Austen's handwriting. It's not the adult Jane Austen's handwriting. So it's very difficult to credit anybody but her with that first act.

And I think there have been—there have been some misconceptions about what makes a good play, I think, honestly, brought to bear with that script, because the first act is—it's very short. And if you just read it the way you would read a novel, it doesn't look like it's very good, but, when you put it up on its feet, you could start seeing how well Jane Austen is telling the story in that act with very few words, but with just the right actions as the words move characters through space, and create this world that she's depicting. So, I think it's very, very skillful, but it's skillful dramaturgically rather than in ways that we're used to looking for with Jane Austen.

Breckyn: Well, I will have to get my hands on a copy of that. But that is the perfect segue to another question I had for you, which is that we know Austen as a novelist, but in the juvenilia, she does try her hand at several different genres: history, poetry, and plays. And since historical theater is one of your specialty areas, I wanted to get more into that. Can you tell us about the plays that Austen wrote?

Lesley: Absolutely. Putting Grandison aside, there are three short plays in the manuscript notebooks. One of them is complete. It's called The Visit. It's a two-act play. And the other two are incomplete. One is called The Mystery, and it features characters walking on stage, and whispering secrets into each other's ears, and then exiting the stage. So you never find out what the secret is.

Breckyn: That's hilarious. What a great joke.

Lesley: It really, really is. And the other one is called The First Act of a Comedy, and it's actually the first act of a musical comedy. It's a chorus line of plow boys. You can imagine them going, one, two, three, kick, turn, while they sing their little songs. And there is quite a bit of music from the contemporary stage at the time that found its way into her music books or piano books, so we know that she enjoyed popular music that came to people from the stage. So, those plays are—they definitely show her wanting to learn how to write plays. They definitely show her responding to particular plays that we know she and her family circle were reading or performing at the time. The Mystery has some references to a play by Hannah Cowley, and one of the plays that the family almost staged, but didn't, was a play called Which is the Man? by Hannah Cowley. And in The Visit there's a character named Cloe, who spells her name very unusually, C-L-O-E; there's no H. And it was probably staged as an afterpiece to another play that her family put on during that same holiday season called High Life Below Stairs, that also features a character named Cloe, spelled exactly the same way.

The Visit not only echoes the character's name, it actually has another character quoting a line from High Life Below Stairs. So, she's definitely responding to those plays. She—there are lots of influence of Sheridan's works, not only in these plays but in the prose juvenilia. Sheridan's play, The Critic, was, I think, Reverend Austen's favorite play, and it's a big influence on Lesley Castle. There are some lovely moments in Lesley Castle that are very much inspired by Sheridan.

I think one of the things that we need to be careful about when we talk about whether Jane Austen liked the theater or whether she saw herself at one stage in her life as like a wannabe dramatist, is the question, "Which theater or which stage are we talking about?" Because her family never put on a play that was written any later than 1775. And after that date, theaters in England were being torn down and rebuilt much, much larger than the older theaters had been, where acoustics were really bad but special effects were much easier to do. So, the professional theater was transitioning into an era of spectacle. And the Austens loved a much more intimate theater, where the actors and the audience, you know, could see each other, could interact, where the audience could hear what the actors were saying, and where, you know, fancy props and backdrops didn't matter so much.

So I think one of the reasons why she decided not to become a playwright is that she didn't like the stage that you had to write for by the time she was an adult. And there are other women playwrights who were successful at the time—people like Elizabeth Inchbald—who write about how very hard it was to be a woman in that business, and the lack of opportunity, the lack of support, the lack of welcome for women playwrights. You had to have an in. You had to be connected with whoever owned the theater. You had to just overcome so many obstacles. And that was not something that Austen could do. It wasn't available to her. She didn't have those connections. She didn't live in London. And I don't think it was congenial to her to be aggressively self-marketing in that way.

Breckyn: Yeah, no, she—I mean she didn't even put her name on her novels, right? She was very private. That's fascinating. I mean—I love that that's—that's clearly your specialty because you have so much to say about it. And I would—we need to have like a Jane Austen and historical theater episode as well and bring you back because that would be fascinating.

Lesley: And don't forget how much she quotes Shakespeare in her History of England.

Breckyn: Yes. Another reason that I think Austen fans should try reading her earlier works is because they're just so funny. Do you have any particular passages that make you laugh, Lesley, or any parts of the stories.

Lesley: I do, and it would be very hard to choose. Maybe I'll pick one from a story that I haven't mentioned so far today, which is Henry and Eliza—no doubt a title inspired by the flirtation that she observed between her brother Henry and her cousin Eliza de Feuillide. But it ends with Eliza—she raised an army with which she steals the Dutchess's [sic] daughter's fiancé, and they run away together. And the Dutchess has—you know, has captured them and threw her in prison. And then to get revenge, as she escapes, "she raised an army with which she entirely demolished the Dutchess's Newgate, snug as it was, and by that act, gained the blessings of thousands and the applause of her own heart." It's ridiculous. It's so extreme, but it also gives us this incredible female hero who can raise an army and tear down prisons.

Breckyn: The juvenilia is radically feminist. It's awesome. So, here's one that I really like that I think is so—in Jack and Alice, we get a female character who is like aggressively chasing down this male—this man that she wants to marry, which is a funny reversal. I sort of feel like she's almost a female Mr. Collins because he won't—you know, he kind of doesn't hear Elizabeth's nos. Like, "Oh, I just assume that you are trying to increase my affection." So, that's what's happening but with a female character. Anyway, she goes to this man's estate and is trying to hunt him down, and he has set out steel bear traps all over his estate, and she steps in one and just shatters her leg. And the line is, "Oh, cruel Charles to wound the hearts and legs of all the fair." It's so bizarre, and she'll just drop that and then you'll move on. And it's also very perfunctory, which is, like, it's jarring but also adds to the absurdity.

Lesley: Yes. And yet it's also extremely literate because it recalls writers like Pope. You might recall that famous line in The Rape of the Lock, where he describes Hampton Court as the place where Queen Anne "did sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea." But it's really clever, and that juxtaposition, that incongruity is something that she's so good at. Yeah. But you wanted me to talk about the Journal of Juvenilia Studies.

Breckyn: Yes.

Lesley: Yes, it is an open access, online, peer-reviewed journal, hosted by the University of Alberta Libraries, and it is dedicated to scholarship in the field of literary as well as visual juvenilia. So, we don't limit ourselves to publishing articles by authors from a particular geographical region or time period, but focusing on the work of people who are under the age of 21. And we publish articles both on really well-known authors, like the Brontës or Jane Austen—John Ruskin also wrote juvenilia—but we're also more and more using the journal as a way of putting a spotlight on child authors who have not been recognized, who have not been acknowledged, and inviting our readership to consider paying more attention to somebody, maybe, whose work has been neglected.

Breckyn: Why do you think that juvenile writings are worth studying academically? I think the existence of the Journal of Juvenile Studies is kind of new and maybe a little radical?

Lesley: Yeah, thank you. Well, it is. There are a lot of different reasons. The conventional reason would be to value juvenilia only for what it tells us about the author's mature work. So, you're going to study the juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë because she went on to write what she did later on, and so that makes her child—her writing retrospectively of value. There are also some very strong arguments to be made for considering juvenilia as a genre. There's been really interesting work that's being done. Rachel Conrad, for instance, who is a professor of childhood studies—which is not juvenilia studies but it's an adjacent field, and there's some really fruitful crossover between the two—she recently published a book called Time for Childhoods, where she argues for an approach to time that is unique to child writers. And Laurie Langbauer has a wonderful book on something she calls prolepsis—the proleptic element of child writers, where she analyzes how child writers tend to write as if they already were the mature, successful poets that they aspire to be. So, is proleptic writing something that is unique to child writers? I think we're just beginning as a field to study what are the characteristics of juvenilia?What makes it distinct? What makes it different from writing or artistic work by adults?

Breckyn: Lesley, this has been such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about Austen's juvenilia. Where can listeners go to learn more about you and your work?

Lesley: Oh, my goodness. Thank you for having me, and thank you for that very flattering question. I have, over the past few years, published several articles on Austen's juvenilia, both in Persuasions—and some of them are available in Persuasions Online and some are available in the print version of Persuasions—and then also in the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, I do have one piece on Young Jane Austen and the Circulation-Library Novel. That's in that journal, and it's free to access. It's a peer-reviewed journal, but we are very committed to making scholarship available to anybody who wants to find it.

Breckyn: That's great. Well, thank you so much, Lesley.

Lesley: Thank you very much, Breckyn. You ask wonderful questions, and your enthusiasm is catching, and your knowledge of Jane Austen is inspiring.


Breckyn: Listeners, I have a potpourri of JASNA updates and reminders for you this month. First up, the winners of the 2025 JASNA Essay Contest have been announced. This year, students were asked to pick something Austen used in her novels—maybe a word, a situation, an object, or even an activity—and compare or contrast how she used it in two different scenes and why. More than 500 students from around the world jumped in, and the outstanding winning essays explore Austen's use of walking, windows, cold tea, thieves, characters named Jane, and more. You can read the winners' entries on our website. From the homepage, click "Publications" in the main menu, then select "Essay Contest Winning Entries," or just use the link that's in our show notes.

Now, a quick update on our annual conference this October 10th through 12th. Although in-person registration for JASNA's AGM is completely full, you can still join us online and celebrate Jane Austen's 250th birthday as a virtual attendee. The Livestream/Virtual package gives you access to all five plenary sessions, featuring Paula Byrne, Juliette Wells, Vanessa Riley, John Mullan, and an author panel with Janine Barchas, Inger Brodey, Collins Hemingway, and Devoney Looser. The package also includes five breakout talks, as well as special guest sessions with Caroline Jane Knight and actress Susannah Harker. If you can't watch everything live, no problem. All sessions will be recorded and available until February 1st. Just be sure to register by October 2nd. The link to register will also be in our show notes.

One last reminder before we wrap up: JASNA is celebrating Jane Austen's milestone birthday with a special gift: free student memberships through December 31, 2025. If you're enrolled in a course of study leading to a high school diploma, a college or university degree, or a trade or professional license or certificate, you qualify. It's the perfect year to join with so many special events planned for this year. Sign up at jasna.org/join.

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“How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!”

Emma