Juvenile Songs and Lessons: Music Culture in Jane Austen's Teenage Years

The stories, poems, and “scraps” Jane Austen wrote in her teenage years are now well known as her juvenilia—crazy, irreverent, transgressive miniatures of a wildly creative mind playing and experimenting with literature. During the same years, Austen was studying music and forming a collection of songs and keyboard pieces that would stay with her throughout her life. The details and dates are uncertain, but sometime after her return from school in 1786, a piano was bought for her, and she seems to have been still having lessons ten years later.