Don’t take me too seriously, she seems to be saying to her intimate audience, at least not yet.

What kind of child was she? A cousin, Philadelphia Walter, meeting the twelve-year-old Jane for the first time, found her “whimsical and affected,” and certainly not as charming as her sister, Cassandra. She was intelligent, we can be certain, and perhaps smug, heedless and prim at the same time, and accustomed to praise from those who knew her best. At home she was not as compelled to temper her opinions, nor constrained to behave as an ordinary well-brought-up child—and we all have seen how such outspoken, precocious children are misunderstood once they stray beyond the family circle.

To read this girlish work today is to see Jane Austen in the sometimes painful process of educating herself to become a writer. Trying on different genres was a way of discovering who she was and the kind of material she could best handle. Her faith in her own inventiveness must have grown with each completed piece, and so did an increasing understanding of psychological realism. Her haphazard schooling and undirected reading left her uncentered, longing for the attention of others, but crying out for her own attention as well.

Her early writing was produced within protective circumstances, and it is no surprise that her efforts are full of family jokes and private references, some of them stinging. The family response to her deliberate outrageousness may be imagined: a rolling of the eyes and “There goes our Jane again!” An almost reckless need to turn the world upside down can be glimpsed in the very early work. Everything in these narratives is at odds. The cozy allusions to family happenings conflict violently with tales of elopement and murder. Extraordinary and shocking class inversions occur, an upstairs/downstairs comedic eye that disappears completely in her mature period, when she seems to have understood the truth that satire can never be used against the powerless; the reader looks in vain to find such clichés as the comical servant or country rustic in Austen’s great novels.

On the other hand, sexual innuendos leap from her mock History of England, completed just before her sixteenth birthday. Murders are committed. Duels are fought. It might even be said that duality fueled the earliest Austen persona, a crude, unnuanced, heartless world of black and white. Though she had not yet found her true expression, she concerned herself from the beginning with the sins of pretentiousness, pomposity, and sentimentality, a thematic line that established itself in all her work.

Amidst all this dramatic exaggeration, there is little that has the feel of deliberate experiment. As a girl, she was less interested in creating new genres than in subverting those that were already established, and she seems to have happily truncated work that was not going well, killing off the more tiresome villains with a stroke of her pen. The chapters of her “novels” are very short, many of them mere gestures. In hindsight, we can see that her gifts, particularly her sense of comedy, were developing. Although there is a restlessness in her rapid skipping from one genre to the next—tributes, mock memoirs, histories, mininovels, verse, drama—and an impatience with extended work, she was respectful enough of her early efforts to keep amending them as she grew into her twenties. The survival of these early works says a good deal about the regard in which they were held by the Austen family; this beloved scribbling child consciously set out to entertain her small audience, but she was taken by them with a surprising measure of seriousness. She was encouraged, was supplied with precious paper, was listened to and applauded.

The best of the works waver between farce and feeling, as though this young writer were torn in three directions, wanting to amuse and also to move her audience, and driven to express what some have called the Cinderella fantasy, the apprehension that a child is, for some mysterious reason, superior to his or her parents. Lesley Castle, an epistolary novel written around Jane’s sixteenth year, indicates an early ability to convey individual voices and to embark on what must have seemed daring directions. Its heroine, Charlotte Lutterell, is intelligent, witty, astringent. (“I have often felt myself extremely satirical,” says Charlotte at one point.) The novel includes an adulterous affair, the abandonment of a baby, and a conversion to Roman Catholicism—which must have left her Church of England father blinking. These forays into vice and high drama may have alarmed Mr. and Mrs. Austen, but their expression seems to have been tolerated. Curiously enough, though, this child of an amiable, indulgent family almost always, in her early work, sketches parents who are either cruel or neglectful or determined in one way or another to thwart the sensitivities of their offspring. What can we make of this? It’s possible she was rebelling against a reality that remains invisible to us. Or she may have been frantic to dramatize what seemed narratively inert and uninteresting. In her mature work the despotic parent is given a much more believable shading, becoming the merely silly or ambitious parent, or the parent who favors one child over the other.