In the Forest of the Night The Juvenelia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 The Young Visiters The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems Quiet Storm: Voices of Young Black Poets

Oh, yeah? Amelia Atwater-Rhodes is the latest counterexample. She finished her first novel, "In the Forests of the Night," last year when she was only 13. An atmospheric revenge tale about a teen vampire, it's as suspenseful and well-constructed as many novels by authors several times her age. "As a teen, I bring a different perspective to writing," Atwater-Rhodes told Teen People. "I can offer immediate emotions, experiences and insight that adult writers often have to reach back and find in order to write about them."

The claim does not quite ring true. Why should the emotions and experiences of the undead be more accessible to a 13-year-old than to an adult? Atwater-Rhodes, who acknowledges her debt to vampire queen Anne Rice, clearly writes not from experience but from a prodigy's traditional sources of information: literature and imagination.

Her high-flown, melancholic romance follows in the tradition of English literature's most distinguished family of youthful writers, the Brontės. Beginning in 1826, when she was 10, Charlotte Brontė and her younger siblings -- her brother, Branwell, and the future novelists Emily and Anne -- wrote obsessive tales and poems about a pair of imaginary countries, Angria and Gondal. Diminutive Charlotte copied hers, which were inspired by Byron, Walter Scott, and the Arabian Nights, into tiny, hand-sewn volumes in microscopic handwriting. Deciphered and transcribed by bleary-eyed scholars, they remain hard to read because of their looping plots and melodrama. However, much of Emily's poetry, which many readers consider on a par with "Wuthering Heights," was written during the Angria years.

The other great English novelist famous for her juvenilia, of course, is Jane Austen. Unlike the Brontės' youthful drivel, every word of hers is worth reading. She devoured the sentimental novelists of her time -- Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney -- then burlesqued them perfectly, developing a voice that deepened, when she grew up, into satire ballasted with sincerity. In "Love and Freindship" [sic], a novel in letters written when Austen was 15, the heroines seem to spend most of their time fainting. One chapter ends, "[T]hey flew into each other's arms. It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself. We fainted alternately on a sofa." The next ends, "To complete such unparalleled barbarity we were informed that an execution [i.e., bankruptcy auction] in the house would shortly take place. Ah! what could we do but what we did! We sighed and fainted on the sofa." Too much fainting undermines their health; one complains to the other with her dying breath, "One fatal swoon has cost me my life ... Beware of swoons ... Run mad as often as you choose; but do not faint." Austen's equally delightful "History of England," written the next year "by a partial, predjudiced, and ignorant Historian," is available in facsimile, complete with illustrations by her sister Cassandra. ("N.B. There will be very few Dates in this History.")

Jane Austen -- maybe even her juvenilia -- was surely the inspiration for another hilarious satire by a teenager, "The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765." First published in 1925, reprinted in 1967 and 1984, and now, alas, out of print again, this supposed journal of Cleone Knox, a boy-crazy Irish heiress, was actually the brainchild of 19-year-old Magdalen King-Hall, who was bored one summer at a "select seaside resort." Always on the brink of eloping, Cleone gets dragged around Britain and Europe by her father, who is bent on marrying her to a dull, wealthy suitor. Her descriptions of clothing are priceless. Oddly, the reading public took it for genuine when it was first published; now it seems obviously crafted and doubly quaint, a 1920s vision of the 18th century.

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