In a matching fitted box. Cream vegetable parchment spine with gilt title. Green and cream hand marbled paper boards.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feel and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Rare, collectable, but far from unique – still a lovely edition

The History of England is a 1791 work by Jane Austen, written when the author was fifteen.

Some years after writing The History of England, Austen compiled this work and 28 other of her early compositions by copying them into three notebooks which she called “Volume the First”, “Volume the Second” and “Volume the Third”. These three volumes comprehensively are considered Austen’s juvenilia, and by some critics her “minor works.” The History of England is in “Volume the Second” (as are Love and Friendship  and four other works) occupying 34 manuscript pages. Cassandra’s 13 illustrations were done after the copying was completed. “Volume the Second” passed to Cassandra at Austen’s death in 1817, and on Cassandra’s death in 1845 to Francis Austen, with whose descendants it remained until it was sold to the British Library in 1977.

None of Austen’s youthful works were published in her lifetime. Francis Austen’s granddaughter, the then-owner of “Volume the Second”, in 1922 permitted Chatto & Windus to publish the entire notebook under the name Love and Friendship. The History was included in volume 6 of R. W. Chapman’s Oxford University Press edition of Jane Austen’s complete works and since then has been published in several new editions and imprints.  A German edition was published for the first time in 2009 by Luxbooks.