“At fifteen, she had few illusions about other people and none about herself,” Virginia Woolf once wrote of Jane Austen. Indeed, the future author of Sense and Sensibility was an early master of dispelling cultural illusions through parody, satire, and general wryness. In 1791, decades before she offered writing advice to her own teenage niece, fifteen-year-old Austen penned The History of England — a short manuscript of 34 pages, subtitled “By a partial, prejudiced & ignorant Historian,” featuring thirteen ink-and-watercolor drawings of English royalty by Austen’s sister, Cassandra. (Austen was not the only prominent writer with an artistically gifted, lesser-known sibling — Virginia Woolf’s sister was the prominent Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell, who illustrated some of Woolf’s work, and Jorge Luis Borges’s sister, Norah Borges, was one of the female pioneers of modern art.)

A play on Oliver Goldsmith’s 1764 classic of the same title, Austen’s book was a parody of the general trend toward reducing history to mere trivia and educational factlets designed for quick, easy digestion — in other words, a proto-parody of the listicle, Austen’s contempt for which one can only imagine.

Young Jane had a similar distaste for the reduction of complex stories into simple facts, another favorite trope of contemporary media. Her outrage over history’s demolition of nuance and dimension began in her marginalia on the pages of Goldsmith’s history. Next to a passage about the Stuart family, she scoffed in pencil: “A family who were always ill used Betrayed or neglected — whose virtues are seldom allowed while their errors are never forgotten.”

After Austen’s death in 1817, Cassandra kept her manuscripts until her own death in 1845. For more than a century thereafter, the notebooks were nearly forgotten and quietly made their way down the family tree, until they ended up in the hands of Cassandra’s great-granddaughter’s niece, who sold them at Sotheby’s in July of 1977. The British Library purchased the notebooks and Austen’s parodic history was published in facsimile for the first time as Jane Austen’s The History of England (public library), including all of the original drawings.

Cassandra’s depictions of English royalty parallel her sister’s parodic tone — there is a lumberjackish Henry VIII, a hipsterly bedraggled Henry VII, and a witchlike Elizabeth I.

Complement Jane Austen’s The History of England with the author’s advice on writing and some delectable recipes inspired by her novels, then revisit Queen Victoria’s own drawings and Virginia Woolf’s quirky family newspaper, illustrated by her teenage nephews.