This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of
fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death
in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of
narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan
is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow
seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores
themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank,
which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises
her acute powers of social observation in the setting