Love and Friendship, Plus Other Writings

Jane Austen displays her other side in 'Love and Friendship. Those who think of her as the height of Victorian respectability and prudence should delve into the tale where she shows her wickedly funny side. This is a collection of letters, rather than a traditional novel. She wrote this in notebooks prior to becoming an adult and it reads like the 'rough drafts' it probably was. Actually most of the book reads like a really funny Saturday Night Live skit. It is a story told through letters about a young couple in love. Naturally, one of them dies and the other is left to carry on in a cruel and wicked world. Sound sad? Not an all! The entire thing is a parody of the sentimentality that was so popular in the novels of the time. A tongue in cheek classic that was delight from the first page.
About the Author: Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction set among the gentry earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer. Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about 35 years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth. From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it. Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and are part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.