Jack and Alice - by Jane Austen (Paperback)

About the Book

Five ingenious stories written by a young Jane Austen. One of ten pocket size paperbacks from Macmillan Collector's Library celebrating the art of the short story.

Book Synopsis

These astoundingly clever stories were written when Jane Austen was between just eleven and eighteen years old, and deserve to be read and admired alongside her novels.

Jack and Alice recounts a raucous masquerade ball and the gossip it provides for months afterwards; Alice, who has had a bit too much to drink, becomes infatuated with the pompous Charles Adams. In The Three Sisters, Mary is determined to be married before her sisters are, even if it means marrying a man she absolutely cannot stand. These stories burst with scandal and absurdity, featuring dramatic deaths, sudden marriage proposals, a prison break, a poisoning, robbery, a shipwreck, and secret affairs.

Austen's wicked sense of humour is fully unleashed here, as she brilliantly skewers romantic, societal and narrative conventions. Her teenage stories are the works of a true genius.

This series of pocket-sized paperbacks celebrates the art of the short story and marks Macmillan Collector's Library's 10th anniversary. Each contains a curated selection of short stories from a literary giant: Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, James, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Alice Dunbar Nelson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rabindranath Tagore.

About the Author

Jane Austen was born in 1775 in rural Hampshire, the daughter of an affluent village rector who encouraged her in her artistic pursuits. In novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma she developed her subtle analysis of contemporary life through depictions of the middle classes in small towns. Her sharp wit and incisive portraits of ordinary people have given her novels enduring popularity. She died in 1817.