Volume the Second In Her Own Hand : American edition : First printing

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 “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 plotlines and characters. Kathryn Sutherland 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.

Volume the Second, housed at the British Library, contains Austen’s famous “The History of England,” illustrated with watercolor portraits by her sister Cassandra, as well as “Love and Friendship,” “Lesley Castle,” and several letters and fragments she calls "scraps". This notebook was compiled between June 1790 and June 1793, from ages fourteen to seventeen.

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 First and Volume the Third. All three volumes are also available in the In Her Own Hand 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.