The kind of thing any casual Austen lover (which should be all of us, if we are human beings who can read) can leave on his or her coffee table. It's perfect to pick up at any given moment, flip through and enjoy the page before you, thinking all the while about a teenage girl in the British countryside over 200 years ago, who is still making us crack up with her imagination and wit.

Finely produced...for anyone languishing with a broken heart there is no better tonic than the comedy - and indeed the cathartic violence - of Jane Austen's youthful writings.

Had she written nothing but these early squibs, the author of "Frederic and Elfrida" might be remembered by a few scholars as a kind of eccentric girl genius.