Love and Freindship

Jane Austen wrote the delightfully silly "Love and Freindship and Other Early Works" in her teenage years to entertain her family. With its endearingly misspelled title, the collection of brief experimental sketches reveals the making of one of the best-loved authors of British literature. In "Love and Friendship" and "Lesley Castle", Austen parodies the sentimental and Gothic novels of love at first sight, clandestine elopements, long-lost relatives, fainting, fatal riding accidents, adultery, and castles. In "The History of England", Austen confirms that the only thing children learn in their classrooms are a few dates and some inconsequential, but usually scandalous, details about the personal lives of monarchs. Fundamentally, though, the stories demonstrate the lively mind and ready wit of a teenage girl living in the late eighteenth century.