This course introduces learners to Jane Austen’s early writings, known as the juvenilia, and explores how these lively, comic and often surprising texts help us understand Austen’s later achievement as a novelist. Across four weeks, students will examine Austen’s experiments with parody, sensibility, Gothic fiction, theatricality, narrative voice and social satire. The course shows that the young Austen was already a sharp, playful and highly self-aware writer, testing the limits of literary convention long before the publication of her major novels. Learners will also consider how the juvenilia connect to Austen’s mature fiction and to her wider literary legacy. No previous specialist knowledge is required, only an interest in Austen, literature and the pleasure of reading