Love and Friendship

By Jane Austen and Fay Weldon

Written in a series of letters to the daughter of a friend, Love and Friendship tells of a young girl's path to betrayal, by way of a seemingly ecstatic marriage. It is accompanied by The Three Sisters, another expertly crafted epistolary novel. When a noble youth arrives unannounced to request the hand of the matchless Laura, it seems their future is one of contentment and bliss—that is until his family learn of the marriage and, one by one, reject the new bride. Such begins the series of unspeakable events that make up Laura's lot in life. But tragedy and comedy here go hand in hand as Austen delivers a stringent satire on drawing-room society, brilliantly heralding her later masterpieces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jun 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781843913146

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist known for six major novels, Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Becoming Jane; Emma; Mansfield Park>; and Northanger Abbey. Her writing style has been widely thought of as a cross between realist and romantic genres. Austen’s prose is poignant, and always features a strong-willed female protagonist. While sparing no detail depicting the lavishness of women in the English upper class, Austen also portrayed the reality of gendered social dynamics in the 19th century. Austen has been hailed as a heroine of her own time, in large part because most of the novels of the day were written by men. Indeed, her literature portrayed a female narrative that was often overlooked in the catalogue of male authors at the time. Austen’s platform gave an important voice to girls and women in literature, and it is for that reason, among countless others, that her works continue to inspire readers today.

Book preview

Love and Friendship

Jane Austen

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword by Fay Weldon

Love and Friendship

The Three Sisters

A Collection of Letters

Biographical note

Hesperus Press

Full list of titles in The Hesperus Anniversary Reprints Series

Hesperus Press Bestsellers

Non-Fiction

Copyright

FOREWORD

What a delightful volume this is – Jane Austen on the lives and loves of teenage girls, in two short epistolary novels and five brilliant short stories written in letter form, and so hitherto neglected. And whatever’s changed in the last two hundred years? These are the same young girls we know today – monsters of hypocrisy while doing their best to be good – moaning, accusing, forgiving, giggling, weeping, fainting, screaming in delight or outrage, who’s to tell; one moment seducing, the next spurning; kind and cruel by turns, intuitive yet obtuse; wholly resistant to parental advice, hopelessly noisy, and in general able to charm and appal within the hour. These days they use mobile phones the better to live in a flurry of excitement: two centuries back they had to content themselves with writing letters. (Mind you, a letter sent one day got there the next: those were the days!)

Jane Austen wrote the works in this book when she herself was in her teens, fresh to the task of writing fiction. She recorded the fitful and whimsical awfulness of her contemporaries with the same exquisite intelligence, mirthful good humour and elegance of style as when she was writing the five great novels of her twenties and thirties. An education in the classics, which she was fortunate enough to have – her clergyman father taught her Latin and Greek – was still fresh in her mind; the rhythm of the prose falls naturally into cadences of three. ‘I hope you like my determination; I can think of nothing better; and am your ever affectionate – Mary Stanhope,’ writes her wilful heroine in The Three Sisters. (See, it’s infectious. What did I just write? – ‘exquisite intelligence, mirthful good humour and elegance of style’. Always the cadence of three, as a chord resolves.) If all within is in letter form, perhaps it’s because (like texting today) the letter comes so naturally to the young, along with, in Austen’s case, the pure joy – nothing purer – of invention. This is exhilarating, energising writing: the writer seems in love with her new-found ability. The reader laughs aloud, and yet feels a kind of melancholy for the loss of youth and if not exactly innocence – for these young heroines of Austen’s are far from innocent – then the bravado, courage and hope that go with being young and silly. As we read, the sense of our lives as a continuous stream from then to now is very strong indeed. Austen is trapped in these pages as a girl, but we know her to have died young, and that is sad.

Austen’s early works tend to be dismissed as juvenilia: they should not be. True, she was certainly very young, fourteen when, in 1790, she wrote Love and Freindship, kindly corrected by the posthumous publishers to ‘Friendship’, but I believe ‘Freindship’ has its own charm and who is to say it was not a deliberate mistake, since Laura, its heroine, was the one writing the letters? One imagines the teenage Jane Austen sitting there by the fire, reading aloud to her family, as was her custom; they will have cut her down to size with gentle mockery, no doubt, rather as she tends to do with her own characters. As you are done by, so you do. ‘Jane,’ perhaps they will have said, ‘really, you can’t have quite so much swooning away in a book, it’s too absurd, even though your friends may have a tendency to it in real life. And perhaps it is not quite the kind of thing you should be writing – best to write about what you know, surely. Not this rather wild invention. You don’t find this kind of thing in serious books, only in trash, which to our minds you read too much of anyway. And look here, you’ve spelled friendship wrong. It’s i before e except after c…’ and Jane will have retreated, hurt, to fight again another day.

But to my mind there is very little juvenile about these early works other than their subject matter and the odd spelling mistake at a time when spelling was not yet so highly regularised as it is today. The prescience of an early death seemed to hothouse the writers of her generation, as it did her. There was little time to practise. You got it right first time round. Death could come early.

Of her more or less coevals, Shelley died at the age of thirty, in 1822, leaving a great body of work behind him. (His child bride Mary began work on Frankenstein when she was eighteen, and no one could describe that monster work as juvenilia.) Byron died at the age of thirty-six, in 1824. Keats at the age of twenty-six, in 1821. Jane Austen, born in 1775, made it to forty-one – doing rather better than the rest of them, but then she lived more quietly, without drink, drugs or wild spouse.

The novella Love and Friendship is a romp through an episode of runaway teenage life. It is said to be a burlesque of Richardson’s epistolary novels Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, but these were written some forty years before Austen began the oeuvre of her fifteenth year. I have no doubt she had read enough contemporary kitchen-table novels by that time to get her going without recourse to Richardson. Kitchen-table novels, so called because they were seen as fit only for servant girls – these days I suppose we could call it kitch-lit – were not so very different from our chick-lit. Our version is designed to be read, not in someone else’s kitchen in the few precious hours off, but on public transport on the way to the office, or on holiday in the sun: it serves the same purpose all the same: it fills the head with dreams of love.

Kitch-lit uses Gothic backgrounds, castles and mists and lonely cottages on the moor – who knows what danger lurks within, but still the heroine ventures out – and the underlying fear is more real. It is of starvation, abduction, false marriage and ravishment. Chick-lit uses loft spaces and family homes as background, and the fear is of social humiliation, sexual harassment behind the filing cabinet, or Rohypnol at the wine bar: the hope is the same – of marriage and happiness ever after.

Pride and Prejudice, written in 1822 – women’s favourite novel of all time, according to a recent BBC poll – and normally listed amongst the five major Austen novels, remains to my mind kitch-lit: it’s a simple romance, poor-girl Elizabeth gets rich-boy Darcy in the most unlikely fashion. But the plot is not the point. It is the lively use of language, the sense of the keen, desperate intelligence, already to be found in the earlier Love and Friendship, which so delights – added of course to the brilliance and familiarity of the subsidiary characters. We all know a living Mr Bennett, a Mr Collins, a Lady de Burgh, only too well – just as, as children, we knew all too well their animal equivalents in the books we loved, The House at Pooh Corner, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland – Eeyore, Tigger, Badger, Toad, White Rabbit and the Dormouse – all alive and well and living around the corner. It is precisely because so little changes when it comes to human nature, and those who can delineate it in fiction are so rare, that books from the past remain relevant, loved, read and reread over the centuries. Jane Austen’s original readers might

Reviews for Love and Friendship

[jnwelch_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Love and Freindship by Jane Austen was written when she was 14 and 15 (mine has her History of England in it, too). Mainly in the form of letters, outrageous spoofs of the romance genre abound. There is some presaging of what is to come with this author, with discussions of the importance of marriage and wealth, obsessions with appearance, inflated pomposity, and more. The writing is impressive - she has a remarkable sense of flow and timing even at such a young age. The spelling disarmingly needs work, particularly on the "i before e" rule.And large swatches are really funny. The young, love-obsessed duo of Laura and Sophia regularly faint at unexpected romantic developments:"She (Sophia) was all Sensibility and Feeling. We flew into each other's arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our Hearts. -- We were interrupted in the delightfull Employment by the entrance of Augustus (Edward's freind), who was just returned from a solitary ramble. Never did I see such an affecting Scene as was the meeting of Edward and Augustus."My Life! my Soul!" (exclaimed the former) "My Adorable Angel!" (replied the latter), as they flew into each other's arms. It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself -- We fainted alternately on a sofa".Perhaps as a sign of maturity, Laura begins instead to regularly "shriek and run mad" at dramatic moments in her life. Soon they are comparing the health benefits of the two, with frenzied fits having the benefit of warmth in the blood and exercise. During a quiet moment, an unplanned entry into a dark carriage one night turns out to be a coincidental reunion with most of Laura's relatives (the carriage somehow having tardis-like proportions), two of whom had stolen money from her during one of her fainting fits.It's believed that Austen would read installments of Love and Freindship aloud at night to entertain her family. One can easily imagine the family's laughter at the wit of this young teen writer, and the exhilaration of her emerging talent.This would not be the place to start reading Jane Austen (too juvenile in the end), and it's hard to imagine someone choosing to read it who is not already a fan of the author via her novels. But for those who are fans, it's a lucky chance to share in the humorous tales of a hugely talented young girl who became one of the world's most famous authors.

[amydross · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating read, it feels very different from other Austen novels. More sharply, openly satirical, but I got the feeling that Austen herself wasn't sure how she felt about her protagonist. Is she really evil, or simply making the best of the poor hand life has dealt her? I think ultimately, the scales tip toward "evil", but then, she does all right for herself in the end, so what's the message there?

[elizabeth_foster-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jane Austen wrote this very funny, relatively short, epistolary tale at the tender age of fourteen or so. The foreword of my edition gives a thorough explanation of the word sensibility as it was understood in Jane Austen's time and that helped my reading of the story immensely. I love Austen's sense of humour and there is plenty on show in Love and Friendship.

[karin7-11 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Love and Freindship and Other Early Works by Jane Austen, published posthumously , Harmony Books 118 pages
??

This is an example of something written by an otherwise good to great author that was published posthumously, perhaps just to make money. While there are some delightful gems interspersed, some of this was written before Jane was even fifteen. While they show many of her stellar qualities, they are still at a more undeveloped stage. Some of these she called “novels” but nothing in this is longer than a short story length, and they are all comprised solely of letters. They are fictional, and do show how Jane’s insights were already sharp and developing even at such a young age. I picked this up for a challenge because I didn’t see this the year I read every Jane Austen book in my library where I was living at the time and it was long enough, but not long, so that I could squeeze it in for a challenge.