Overall, the volume itself is also testament to the legacy of a writer who has been so loved and cherished. The title “Love and Freindship” therefore provides an opening to reappraise Austen, as a novelist who was interested in the camaraderie between friends and family as well as between lovers, an astute observer who desired to capture the humour as well as the drama of various relationships around her, and to use her experiences to inform and inspire her fiction. Yet her depiction of friendship, between, for example, Emma Woodhouse and Harriet Smith in Emma (1815), and Lizzie Bennet and Charlotte Collins in Pride & Prejudice, is equally charming and revealing.
Austen is known for writing romances, capturing courtships, and leaving an impressive collection of novels which have been adapted numerous times for film and television. As Austen’s juvenilia was likely written for her correspondent and cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, her early writing indicates a desire to write for amusement, and to share a joke with her reader, from a formative point in her life. It is worth noting that whilst in many instances Austen’s characters write instantly to cherished correspondents and friends to inform them of the major happenings in their lives, Austen was also a great letter writer. Accompanied by watercolour illustrations in which Austen imagines her family, in contemporary clothes, acting out the parts of these acutely-drawn figures from history, Austen’s careful depictions indicate at an affectionate familiarity beneath the wry humour.įrontispiece, Jane Austen, Love and Freindship, Chatto & Windus, 1922 A particular highlight is her “History of England” by a “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian,” which discusses the quirks and caprices of the country’s historic Kings and Queens. Sharp and satirical, this piece provides an interesting insight into the young writer’s views on love.Īside from the extract which gives this volume its title, however, this publication also contains other early Austen pieces, gathered from the manuscripts later entrusted to Austen’s sister, Cassandra. Featuring an early short story, “Love and Freindship ”, in which Austen contemplates the folly of lovestruck young women falling into fainting fits, this pithy parody of a romance anticipates similar characters in her later novels, such as Marianne Dashwood in Sense & Sensibility (1811), Lydia Bennet in Pride & Prejudice (1813), and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (1818). This small volume, printed by Chatto & Windus in 1922, forms the first published compilation of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, written between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.
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