Volume the Third by Jane Austen (In Her Own Hand)

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 Third, written when Austen was sixteen, includes two stories: “Evelyn” and “Kitty, or the Bower” (or “Catharine”). The manuscript is also held at the British Library. This volume includes text written by her niece, Anna Lefroy, who contributes an addition to "Evelyn."

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 Second. All three volumes are also available in the In Her Own Hand series boxed set.