Jane Austen is one of England’s most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature’s most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were fi rst published. This selection of Jane Austen’s earliest writing remained unpublished during her lifetime. The title story was written before she was 15, while the other stories were completed before she was 17.