Jack and Alice

<p><b>These astoundingly clever stories were written when Jane Austen was between just eleven and eighteen years old, and deserve to be read and admired alongside her novels.</b><br><br><i>Jack and Alice </i>recounts a raucous masquerade ball and the gossip it provides for months afterwards; Alice, who has had a bit too much to drink, becomes infatuated with the pompous Charles Adams. In <i>The Three Sisters,</i> Mary is determined to be married before her sisters are, even if it means marrying a man she absolutely cannot stand. These stories burst with scandal and absurdity, featuring dramatic deaths, sudden marriage proposals, a prison break, a poisoning, robbery, a shipwreck, and secret affairs.<br><br>Austen’s wicked sense of humour is fully unleashed here, as she brilliantly skewers romantic, societal and narrative conventions. Her teenage stories are the works of a true genius.<br><br>This series of pocket-sized paperbacks celebrates the art of the short story and marks Macmillan Collector''s Library''s 10th anniversary. Each contains a curated selection of short stories from a literary giant: Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Alice Dunbar Nelson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rabindranath Tagore.</p>