She had multiple juvenilia projects in process, one of them a sarcastic history textbook that poked fun at the prevailing stiff approaches and attitudes towards recounting past events. She was writing mainly as a form of self-amusement and for her family’s private entertainment, which allowed her a high degree of freedom for developmental experimentation with form, style, and subject matter. In her adolescence, the prospect of publication was not yet her ultimate goal. She was not writing to teach, but to express herself, in her own satirical way.Īusten was only fifteen years old when she wrote The History of England in 1791, but she was already finding her footing as a writer and sharp-witted social commentator. Anyone looking for a more serious historic text should look elsewhere. “There will be very few dates in this history,” she warns her readers in her introduction. “By a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian.” Who else but Jane Austen could start a book with such a cheeky line? Austen opens The History of England with these words, and she would just get funnier from there.
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