Five-minute digest
Love and Freindship and Other Early Works
Summary
This volume gathers comic pieces that Jane Austen wrote as a teenager at Steventon rectory, between about 1790 and 1793, and copied into the notebook she called Volume the Second. The title work, 'Love and Freindship', dated 13 June 1790 when she was fourteen, is a novel in fifteen letters parodying the sentimental fiction of the day. Laura, now fifty-five, tells her friend Isabel's daughter Marianne the misfortunes of her life. Born of a Welsh-Irish father and a mother descended from a Scotch peer and an Italian opera-girl, Laura grows up full of sensibility in the Vale of Uske. A young stranger, Edward, knocks at the cottage door on a stormy night and marries her at once; he has fled his father, Sir Edward, rather than marry the lovely Lady Dorothea, declaring that it shall never be said that he obliged his father. The couple flee to Edward's friend Augustus and his wife Sophia, and the two heroines become bosom friends, fainting alternately on a sofa. Augustus is arrested for debts incurred by living on money taken from his father's desk, Edward disappears, and the women set off for Scotland, where a long-lost grandfather, Lord St Clair, distributes banknotes to four newly discovered grandchildren and leaves. At their cousin Macdonald's house they persuade his daughter Janetta to throw over the suitor her father approves and elope with a stranger, and are turned out when Sophia is caught taking banknotes from Macdonald's drawer. A phaeton overturns near them carrying Edward and Augustus, who are dying; Sophia faints and Laura runs mad by turns, and Sophia later dies of a chill caught from fainting on damp ground, advising Laura to run mad as often as she chooses but never to faint. Laura retires on an allowance from Sir Edward to a Highland village. The volume also contains 'Lesley Castle', an unfinished novel in letters among Scottish and Sussex families, in which Charlotte Lutterell mourns the wasted wedding feast after her sister's fiancé is killed; 'The History of England', a mock textbook 'by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian' that champions Mary, Queen of Scots against Elizabeth; 'A Collection of Letters' dedicated to her cousin Jane Cooper; and short squibs including 'The Female Philosopher', 'The First Act of a Comedy', Anna Parker's letter of cheerfully confessed crimes, 'A Tour through Wales' and 'A Tale'. The pieces were first printed in 1922. The library text follows the Project Gutenberg transcription, which reproduces the stories but not G. K. Chesterton's preface to the 1922 edition.
Top Lessons
Parody as criticism
By pushing the sentimental novel's swoons, instant friendships and noble defiance of parents to absurdity, the teenage Austen shows exactly what she thinks is false in them. Parody is a way of reading critically with a laugh.
Sensibility and selfishness
Laura and Sophia boast of hearts too tender for the world, yet they steal, break engagements and ignore others' needs. Austen suggests that cultivated feeling is no substitute for honesty and duty.
Writing for an audience at home
Each piece is dedicated to a family member or friend, and the jokes assume readers who know the novels and history books being mocked. Austen learned her craft by entertaining a circle that loved reading.
History and partiality
The young historian announces that she is partial, prejudiced and ignorant, and proves it. The joke invites readers to notice how real histories also take sides.
Verified Quotes
“My Father was a native of Ireland and an inhabitant of Wales; my Mother was the natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an italian Opera-girl—I was born in Spain and received my Education at a Convent in France.”
Frequently cited
“A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Freinds, my Acquaintance and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called.”
“No! Never shall it be said that I obliged my Father.”
Frequently cited
“It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself—We fainted alternately on a sofa.”
Frequently cited
“Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”
“BY A PARTIAL, PREJUDICED, AND IGNORANT HISTORIAN.”
“N.B. There will be very few Dates in this History.”
“I murdered my father at a very early period of my Life, I have since murdered my Mother, and I am now going to murder my Sister.”
Medical Lens
The comedy turns on the period's belief that fine feeling showed itself in the body: Laura and Sophia faint, swoon and 'run mad' at every emotion, and Sophia dies of a chill caught from fainting on damp ground, warning that a frenzy fit is better exercise than a swoon. Austen is mocking the swooning heroine of sentimental fiction, not describing a disorder, and the burlesque is a useful period counterpoint to serious contemporary writing on nervous sensibility. In 'Lesley Castle' a fiancé is killed by a fall from his horse just before his wedding, treated with deliberately callous comedy.
- Love and Freindship, Letter the 13th
Finding their husbands dying by the overturned phaeton, Sophia faints and Laura runs mad, alternately, for over an hour.
- Love and Freindship, Letter the 14th
Sophia's fatal illness from fainting in the night air and her deathbed warning against swoons.