Title: Love and Friendship
Author: Jane Austen
Genre: Classics
Pages: 64
Rating: 3/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Jane Austen; Mount TBR; Fall into Reading
How I Got It: iPad read
From Wikipedia:
Love and Freindship [sic] is a juvenile story by Jane Austen, dated 1790. From the age of eleven until she was eighteen, Jane Austen wrote her tales in three notebooks. The notebooks still exist – one in the Bodleian Library; the other two in the British Museum. They include among others Love and Freindship, written when Jane was fourteen, and The History of England, when she was fifteen. Written in epistolary form, like her later unpublished novella, Lady Susan, Love and Freindship is thought to be one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family; it was dedicated to her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, "La Comtesse de Feuillide". The installments, written as letters from the heroine Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend Isabel, may have come about as nightly readings by the young Jane in the Austen home. Love and Freindship (the misspelling is one of many in the story) is clearly a parody of romantic novels Austen read as a child. This is clear even from the subtitle, "Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love", which completely undercuts the title.
An interesting bit of writing from my favorite author. Right away you can tell that this was written very early on in her life. There's a sense of immaturity about the characters and the plot. But we do get a little of the wit and social criticism that are so prevalent in her later works. I wouldn't say that I really enjoyed this volume, but I did appreciate discovering another piece of Austen's writing.