Kathryn Sutherland

Jane Austen Practising: what her Teenage Writings can teach us

At a time when teen fiction scarcely existed, the young Jane Austen used wilful misreading to test the limits of both writing and female conduct. Such deliberate misreading shows how early the activity of critical reading informed her style as a writer. Her adult novels, too, imply a critical reading of both fiction and the world.

Wilful misreading is a form of engagement, a way of understanding, by pulling something apart to see how it works. Jane Austen’s teenage writings show her training herself in the parts and rules of fiction and they show her critiquing the limits imposed on female behaviour in late eighteenth-century English society.