Love and Freindship: and Other Early Works

Love and Freindship [sic] is a juvenile story by Jane Austen, dated 1790. From the age of eleven until she was eighteen, Jane Austen wrote her tales in three notebooks. The notebooks still exist ? one in the Bodleian Library; the other two in the British Museum. Written in epistolary form Love and Freindship is thought to be one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family. The installments, written as letters from the heroine Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend, Isabel, "La Comtesse de Feuillide", may have come about as nightly readings by the young Jane in the Austen home. Love and Freindship is clearly a parody of romantic novels Austen read as a child. In form, it resembles a fairy tale as much as anything else, featuring wild coincidences and turns of fortune, but Austen is determined to lampoon the conventions of romantic stories, right down to the utter failure of romantic fainting spells, which always turn out badly for the female characters. In this story one can see the development of Austen's sharp wit and disdain for romantic sensibility, so characteristic of her later novels.