“We are going on a trip to Europe,” begins what could be Ernest Hemingway’s first piece of fiction. It was discovered in May in Florida – and made public last week – in the archives kept by a family close to the Hemingways. A page in a notebook dated “Sep 8 ‘09” looks like a diary entry by Hemingway, who would have been 10 at the time.

Sandra Spanier, English professor and general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, saw the notebook in May, and realised that it wasn’t a travelogue – Hemingway had never made the trip – but was his own creation. At that young age, it bore some of the writer’s hallmarks. “Hemingway later said that his method was to invent from experience and he often placed his characters in absolutely realistically described landscapes,” she noted.

Another gem, then, to add to the pile of juvenilia created by great artists as small children – all guaranteed to make the rest of us feel that we should have got started sooner. Here are just a few of the most humbling examples:

Jane Austen

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jane Austen. Photograph: GraphicaArtis#Unified ED/Getty Images

The earliest writings of Jane Austen date from when she was about 11 or 12 and include stories and parodies, with “exuberantly expressionistic tales of sexual misdemeanour, of female drunkenness and violence”. It is, writes Prof Kathryn Sutherland for the British Library, “not too fanciful to find traces of the strong-minded heroines of these early experiments” in her later novels. “Running through them is a pronounced thread of comment on and wilful misreading of the literature of her day, showing how thoroughly and how early the activity of critical reading informed her character as a writer.”



Mozart

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mozart, aged 14. Photograph: Royal Society/PA

Mozart was composing his first music at the age of four or five – short pieces that were written down by his father. He wrote Symphony No 1 when he was eight. “The music feels derivative, like a faithful and accomplished copy of the work of his peers,” wrote the conductor Ian Page who embarked on a mission to play all of Mozart’s music in order, “yet it already has its own distinct voice and individuality.”

Virginia Woolf

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Virginia Woolf, c1933. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

22 Hyde Park Gate, London, the childhood home of Virginia (later Woolf), Vanessa (later Bell) and their brother Thoby Stephen, was also the editorial offices of the Hyde Park Gate News – the family magazine the three children put together. Described as “boisterous” and spirited, with its comic stories, gossip and riddles, it ran from 1891 (when Virginia was 10) to 1895. It’s possible to spot themes and events that make it into her later novels but also shows, writes her biographer Hermione Lee, “in its vivid, ebullient, attentive flow of comment, early symptoms of one of the world’s great diary-writers.”

Pablo Picasso

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pablo Picasso, 1912. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images

One of Picasso’s first drawings was of a statue of Hercules that belonged to his father, created when he was nine. “I have never done children’s drawings, never,” he boldly claimed. A couple of other childhood drawings survive. “Tempting as it is to see the germ of great art in Picasso’s juvenilia, they are … what one would expect from a reasonably gifted child,” writes John Richardson in his biography of the artist. Childhood work is not always a predictor of genius, then. Still, it’s worth hanging on to your child’s scribbles/lumpen pottery/hideous poetry, so scholars can critique it in future when their true talent emerges.