Love and Freindship [sic].

Before the poise of Pride and Prejudice, there was a fifteen-year-old scribbling in a notebook and delighting in her own mischief. Love and Freindship keeps its author's deliberate misspelling as a badge of honour, and the wit inside is every bit as unruly.

What it's about

Told in a chain of letters, this early piece follows the fervent Laura as she recounts her adventures to the daughter of a friend, supposedly as moral instruction. What unfolds instead is a cavalcade of instant friendships, secret marriages, sudden faintings and characters who die at the roadside with time for one last speech. Austen borrows every device of the fashionable novel of sensibility and turns each one up until it snaps. The result is less a story than a gleeful demolition, narrated by heroines convinced that a delicate nervous system is the highest form of virtue.

Themes

Sense against sensibility, of course, but handled with a lightness the later novels would trade for depth. Austen mocks the cult of feeling that prized swooning over sound judgement, and she is already fascinated by the gap between how people describe themselves and how they behave. Money, self-interest and the theatrics of romance are all here in miniature. So is a suspicion of anyone who talks too readily about their own fine feelings.

Why it still matters

This is the workshop where a great comic voice first tested its tools. Reading it, you catch the irony, the perfectly weighted sentence and the merciless eye for absurdity that would later be polished to a shine. It is also simply one of the funniest things Austen ever wrote, unguarded in a way the published novels rarely allowed themselves to be. For anyone who loves her, it is a rare glimpse of the writer before the reputation.

Who it's for

Austen devotees who want to see where it began, readers who enjoy literary parody, and anyone in the mood for something short, sharp and gloriously silly. A perfect evening's read that leaves you grinning.