ABSTRACT
This article introduces the reader to Jane Austen's writings from age eleven to seventeen, all of which are quite unlike anything she wrote in her novels insofar as good manners are their target, not norm. The word “googly” in the article's title is a term from cricket in which the bowler throws a very tricky pitch. Given what we expect to find in a novel of Austen's, her writing stories that deal with homosexuality, bigamy, murder, suicide, hanging, and child abandonment in a joking way show her getting as much spin on her pen as the best of bowlers get on their pitches. The stories that deal with these matters are invariably hilarious, various in form, and laugh-out-loud in their reading. Indeed, in G. K. Chesterton's words, they are “the gigantic inspiration of laughter.” This article is an introduction to them.
