In this highly original collection leading scholars address the largely overlooked genre of childhood writings by major authors, and explore the genesis of genius. The book includes essays on the first writings of Jane Austen, Byron, Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte and Branwell Bronte, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf. All began writing for pleasure as children, and later developed their professional ambitions. In bursts of creative energy, these young authors, as well as those like Daisy Ashford, who wrote only as a child, produced prose, verse,...

McMaster's lively study looks at the various codes by which eighteenth-century novelists made the minds of their characters legible through their bodies. She tellingly explores the discourses of medicine, physiognomy, gesture and facial expression, completely familiar to contemporary readers but not to us, in ways that enrich our reading of such classics as Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, as well as of novels by Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.

In this highly original collection leading scholars address the largely overlooked genre of childhood writings by major authors, and explore the genesis of genius. The book includes essays on the first writings of Jane Austen, Byron, Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte and Branwell Bronte, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf. All began writing for pleasure as children, and later developed their professional ambitions. In bursts of creative energy, these young authors, as well as those like Daisy Ashford, who wrote only as a child, produced prose, verse,...

"Even many of her admirers are ready to admit that though she is a great novelist, it is not to Jane Austen that we should go if we want to be deeply moved: she is great for other reasons. I am ready to admit numbers of reasons for which she is a great novelist; but I find no need to apologize for her in the area of her main concern. My contention is that her subject was love, and she knew her subject." (from the Foreword)

In these essays, McMaster's recurring concern is with the interpenetration of intelligence with emotion among Austen's characters. The book explores Austen's popularity in our culture and then moves on to an examination of all the novels, of the operation of love and the articulation of desire.