Austen's writing career started at the age of twelve. Between 1787 and 1793 and before becoming a published author, she wrote twenty-seven pieces in prose, drama and verse and organized them in three volumes to which critics now refer as the juvenilia. Unlike Fanny Burney, who destroyed the writings of her youth when she turned fifteen, Austen held on to her early work and revised it as late as in 1809. She clearly considered it as much a part of her artistic achievement as her mature novels. Originally, the pieces of the juvenilia were read to the family, which explains also the dedication of each production to family members and close friends. As Jan Fergus points out, Austen had a clear audience in mind, an intimate circle of family and friends. If we agree with John McAleer, the juvenilia offer a source of information about the novelist's literary formation and ‘what interested her during a pivotal stage of her existence’.

The juvenilia are a fitting starting point, because they lend themselves to two fundamental aspects pursued in this book: first, being composed over a period of six years, the juvenilia invite the critic to investigate the diachronic evolution of Austen's fiction. The first aspect then can be described as the ‘processual’ character that clears away the temptation to see as a fixed state what in fact is dynamic. The ‘processual’ encourages the search for continuities between earlier and later representations, thus avoiding the pitfall of isolated considerations.