Journal of Juvenilia Studies
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Wishing the Juvenilia Away: Jane Austen\u27s Advice to Caroline
No full textCaroline Austen wrote in 1867 that her aunt Jane, at the end of her life, had discouraged her from writing until she was 16, and had said that she herself wished that she had waited until she was older. She advised Caroline to spend her teenage years reading, rather than writing (“My Aunt Jane Austen”, Memoir ed. Kathryn Sutherland, 174). It is likely that Volumes the First, the Second and the Third of her teenage writings date from between 1787 and 1793, the years when Austen was aged between eleven and fifteen (Teenage Writings, ed. Kathryn Sutherland).
Caroline was twelve when Austen died in 1817. Austen did not destroy the volumes and they were inherited by Cassandra who bequeathed them in turn to various male relatives, including Caroline’s brother James Edward, who received Volume the Third. These works are now admired for their vivacious audacity, and the idea that Austen wished that she had not written these brilliant and outrageous fragments is unsettling to the twenty-first century reader. We value them for many reasons: for the evidence of Austen’s experiments with contemporary literary forms, for the insight they provide into the teenage Austen’s attitudes and tastes, and for their sheer hilarity. We can also see, in the juvenilia, the mature Austen learning her craft. However, it is possible that she might, in later life, have looked back on the flagrant amorality of stories like “Jack and Alice” and “The Beautifull Cassandra” with mixed feelings, particularly, perhaps, as she faced her imminent death.
In this paper I will suggest some reasons for her advice to her niece, in the context of writing advice she gave to her other young relatives and various circumstances of her later life
JJS 4.2 Table of Contents
No full textThis is the Table of Contents for Vol. 4, No. 2 of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies
Child Journalists, the Civil War, and the Intersectional Work of Reporting Grief
Get PDFIn 1864, editors of two nationally-circulating periodicals, Nellie Williams (aged 14) and her sisters, Allie and Mary (aged 12 and 17), reported that their only brother and Union Soldier, Leroy K. Williams, was missing in action. Filtering personal trauma through the performative discourses of nineteenth-century journalism, these young writers publicised their anguish over their brother’s capture. The culturally-situated intersectional identities reflected in and contested by their reporting—as white Northerners, working-class youth, loyal sisters, and enterprising journalists—expose a kaleidoscope of fissures and collisions between private and public, silence and enunciation, gender and class, trauma and resilience. The resulting tensions illustrate the ways by which genres shaped, and were shaped by, children’s articulations of suffering for a national audience during wartime
Reviews
Get PDFEarly Writings, by Margaret Atwood, edited by Nora Stovel and Donna Couto (Juvenilia Press, 2020), reviewed by Isobel Grundy; Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line, vol. 41, no. 1 (Winter 2020) and Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, vol. 42 (2020), reviewed by Bonnie Herron; Diary of a Young Naturalist, by Dara McAnulty (Little Toller Books, 2020), reviewed by Rebecca Welshman
Samhita Arni\u27s Daring Debut : The Mahabharata Revisited in the Twenty-First Century
Get PDFIndian writer Samhita Arni started writing and illustrating her first book when she was just eight years old. The really outstanding feat of this child sensation is that Arni chose to rewrite the Mahabharata, one of the two Sanskrit epics of ancient India, a narrative poem composed around 400 years BCE and still a highly significant cultural icon in contemporary India. Indian children are brought up on stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana from a very early age so the characters and their values become role models for boys and girls alike. The Mahabharata – A Child’s View (published in 1996 when Arni was eleven) takes on a critical stance against one of the epic’s major themes: war and she seeks to give a voice to many of the underestimated characters, especially women and members of the lower classes.
Arni’s naivety in embarking on such a momentous task as a contemporary rewriting of a classical work needs to be remarked on. The Mahabharata is possibly the world’s longest known epic poem, one of its many versions consisting of well over 200,000 lines. She has deliberately omitted certain episodes and daringly added new ones without deviating from the overall plot. Her fearless feminist stance, striking for a girl of eleven, proves that valid contemporary readings of the classics indicate their timeless quality and the essential orality of these texts, without which they can too easily be fossilized and rendered irrelevant for modern times. I conclude by suggesting that Arni’s debut novel is a challenging dialogue between ancient ideals and twenty-first century social and political issues
Effusions Witty and Romantic: Teenage Writings of Jane Austen and Anna Maria Porter
Get PDFIt is only by undertaking comparative work that one can begin to study juvenilia as a genre. Hence my project here of linking two young writers of the same period, Jane Austen and Anna Maria Porter.
These two girl authors were roughly the same age when they were writing: in their teens. Jane was born in 1775, Maria (as she was known in the Porter family) in 1780. (I call them “Jane” and “Maria” as girls, and reserve the last names for reference to their mature works.) Jane Austen’s life, 1775 to 1817, is already well known. Anna Maria Porter’s’ dates are 1780 to 1832. Her older sister Jane Porter, author of The Scottish Chiefs among other things, is perhaps better known. But Anna Maria Porter published a number of historical romances, not unlike some of Scott’s – and Scott was a neighbour and friend of the Porter family. They include, for instance, The Lake of Killarney (1804), The Knight of St. John (1817), and Octavia (1833). They were popular at home and abroad, and were often reprinted
Reviews
Get PDFSusannah Fullerton reviews Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years, by Gerri Kimber, and Daniel Hughes reviews Discovering Dylan Thomas: A Companion to the Collected Poems and Notebook Poems, by John Goodby
Young Jane Austen and the Circulation-Library Novel
Get PDFAlthough William Lane only began publishing under the Minerva imprint in 1790, by the end of that decade he had—thanks to his ongoing publication of gothic romances written in imitation of Ann Radcliffe, his recruitment of unknown women authors, and his innovative marketing strategies—eclipsed the competition. Before the Minerva era began, however, one of Lane’s major competitors in the field of circulation-library formula fiction, Thomas Hookham, published several novels that were important to Jane Austen’s juvenilia, including the three this essay focuses on: Ann Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and two by Eliza Nugent Bromley, Laura and Augustus (1784) and The History of Sir Charles Bentinck and Louisa Cavendish (178/1789?). In addition, because advertisements, catalogues, and other reading lists were important to readers and self-fashioning important to the aspiring young author, besides these primary texts I also consider associated paratexts. These include titles and dedications in Austen’s case and, in Hookham’s case, a list of “Books Printed by T. Hookham,” which appears inside Athlin and Dunbayne immediately following the title page, where any reader must notice it. Although we cannot know for sure, it is possible that this particular list directly influenced Austen’s (and the Austen family’s) choice of reading material in 1789 as well as Austen’s subsequent choice of satiric targets for “Love and Freindship.” In any case, the very possibility that she paid such close attention to Hookham’s list of “Books Printed” prompts a careful consideration of what the juvenilia may reveal about her reading process, her youthful understanding of circulation-library publishers’ marketing strategies and materials, and her response to the model of authorship they promoted.
Taken together, these texts and paratexts strongly suggest that the teenaged Austen appreciated the practical use of lists like the one found in “Books Printed” and made good use of them as a reader who was committed to mastering generic conventions, but that she also parodied their rhetoric in her own titles and dedications; they suggest, moreover, that she appreciated the pleasurable recognition of the familiar enjoyed by readers of circulation-library publisher’s formulaic fiction but was skeptical about certain aspects of the reading and writing networks that such publishers’ marketing strategies were designed to produce. After all, one of the targets of her satire in “Love and Freindship” is quixotic young ladies who, like this epistolary novel’s narrator Laura, set out on the road of literary imitation and end up both disappointing and disappointed
Reviews
Get PDFEdward Mendelson, Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography (Princeton UP 2017), reviewed by Janet Montefiore; Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë, The Diary Papers of Emily and Anne Brontë, edited by Christine Alexander, with Mandy Swann (Juvenilia Press, 2019), reviewed by Deborah Denenholz Morse; Lucasta Miller. L. E. L.: The Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the “Female Byron" (Anchor Books of Penguin Random House, 2019), reviewed by Beverly Taylor.