📙 From the age of eleven until she was eighteen, Jane Austen wrote her tales in three notebooks. The notebooks still exist – one in the Bodleian Library; the other two in the British Museum. This is from Jane Austen's childhood, and despite their rough nature, they offer something of value: not just the insight they give us into Austen's thinking and her mind, but there is a certain charm here, a thing to value in its own. . . .