Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Jane Austen didn’t wait to become an adult to start writing. As a kid she was telling stories to her family, and in her early work you can see her wicked sense of humor and her ability to step inside the mind of another person — even if that person held views completely different from Jane’s.
The History of England was written in 1791, when Jane was just 16 years old. It is full of short, hilarious, and wildly inaccurate biographies of some of the kings and queens of England, focusing mainly on a woman who was never a queen of England at all.
Teenagers can learn a lot from Jane by reading this book. You don’t have to wait to be a grownup to start writing. Books don’t have to be long in order to be really fun to read. And you shouldn’t automatically consider a narrator reliable just because the word “history” is in the title of the book.
Listen to my audiobook recording of Jane Austen’s History of England and see Cassandra Austen’s illustrations here: