Love and Freindship.

Long before Elizabeth Bennet, a teenage Jane Austen was already skewering the fashionable fiction of her day, sending her heroines into swoons, elopements and improbable disasters with a straight face and a wicked grin.

What it's about

Love and Freindship, its title misspelled with cheerful deliberateness, is an early comic work Austen wrote as a young teenager, cast as a series of letters offering worldly advice to a friend's daughter. The narrator recounts a life crowded with romantic misadventure, instant passions, secret marriages, sudden reunions and even more sudden faintings, all delivered in the breathless style of the sentimental novels then in vogue. The plot piles absurdity upon absurdity, precisely because absurdity is the point.

Themes

This is parody with a purpose. Austen mocks the cult of extreme sensibility, the idea that violent feeling is a sign of virtue, and exposes how self-indulgence and folly hide behind a mask of fine emotion. Her heroines justify theft, neglect and outright selfishness in the name of tender feeling, and the comedy lies in the gap between their noble language and their appalling behavior. The satire already carries the moral clarity and shrewd judgment of character that mark her mature work.

Why it still matters

Written in the 1790s and long circulated only within her family, this juvenile piece is a delight in its own right and a revelation for anyone who loves Austen. It shows her comic genius fully formed at a startlingly young age, and it illuminates the roots of the irony that runs through Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Short, sharp and very funny, it is the perfect proof that Austen was a satirist before she was anything else.

Who it's for

Perfect for Austen enthusiasts curious about her beginnings, and for anyone who enjoys literary parody and sparkling wit. Readers who love comic fiction and want a quick, brilliant taste of a great author in the making will be charmed.