Love and Freindship

Written when Jane Austen was just fourteen, Love and Freindship (the misspelling is hers) is a rollicking epistolary parody of the overwrought sentimental novels she devoured as a girl. Told through letters from the incident-prone Laura to her friend Isabel's daughter Marianne, it piles up elopements, sudden disinheritances, fortuitous coincidences, and fainting fits at a breathless pace, gleefully skewering every convention of the genre it apes.

Laura's breathless narration of her own supposedly tragic life — married in an instant, orphaned by discovery, adrift with a friend named Sophia who faints at the slightest provocation — mocks the cult of exaggerated sensibility that dominated the fiction of Austen's youth, anticipating the sharper satire of Sense and Sensibility's Marianne Dashwood years later.

Unpolished and gleefully silly in a way her mature novels never allowed themselves to be, Love and Freindship offers a rare, delighted glimpse of Austen's wit before it found its adult subtlety.