2017 is the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death.
Compared to previous editions of her early works, Jane Austen's Teenage Writings contextualizes them more fully as a collection within the novelist's wider oeuvre.
The new edition provides fresh readings of individual texts, suggesting the need for different editorial protocols.
Full Textual and Explanatory Notes accompany Teenage Writings, offering a comprehensive re-appraisal of their sophisticated relationship to their sources. The Explanatory Notes expand our sense of what the young Austen might have been reading and responding to.
The text presented here of 'Kitty, or the Bower' offers the reader the first opportunity, other than that granted to Jane Austen's immediate family, to read her story as she wrote it - and before the next generation set about its revision and amelioration.
The text restores Austen's many distinctive and quirky abbreviations as they appear in the early works.
This edition includes a Chronology of Composition, a Note on Spelling, a Note on the Text, and two maps to assist the reader - one of locations in Great Britain (real and fictional) mentioned by Austen, and one of late eighteenth-century London.
