Love and Freindship

Jane Austen wrote this gleeful spoof of sentimental fiction as a teenager, and its fainting heroines and absurd coincidences reveal the razor wit that would later power her great novels.

At a glance Long before Elizabeth Bennet, a teenage Jane Austen was already skewering the… What it's about Love and Freindship, its title misspelled with cheerful deliberateness… The narrator recounts a life crowded with romantic misadventure, instant passions… The plot piles absurdity upon absurdity, precisely because absurdity is the point.

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.