Volume the First by Jane Austen: In Her Own Hand

For the first time, Jane Austen’s brilliant early manuscripts are available in beautiful facsimile editions.

Forever immortalized as the author of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen actually produced her first “book” as a teenager, Volume the First. Taking its name from the inscription on the cover, this brilliant little collection includes the stories, playlets, verses, and moral fragments she wrote likely from ages twelve to eighteen. The volume was produced for the enjoyment of her family and close friends―entertaining it was and is!

Now it is available for all of us to see.

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 plotlines and characters. Kathryn Sutherland’s introduction 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. The work of a young adult, Volume the First nevertheless reveals the development of the unmistakable voice and style that would mark her as one of the most popular authors of all time.

Volume the First, housed at the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, includes the following stories: “Frederic & Elfrida,” “Jack & Alice,” “Edgar & Emma,” “Henry & Eliza,” “Mr Harley,” “Sir William Montague,” “Mr Clifford,” “The Beautiful Cassandra,” “Amelia Webster,” “The Visit,” “The Mystery,” “The three Sisters,” “Detached Pieces,” and “Ode to Pity.”

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.

Learn more about the other books in the In Her Own Hand series: Volume the Second and Volume the Third. All three volumes are also available in the In Her Own Hand series boxed set.

Jane Austen (1775―1817) is one of the most beloved novelists in the English language. Her novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion have left readers with a literary legacy hard to match by any author before or since.

Kathryn Sutherland is Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood and the editor of the Digital Edition of Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts.