Love and Friendship

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 Friendship, 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Written in epistolary form, like her later unpublished novella, Lady Susan, Love and Friendship is thought to be one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family. The installments, written as letters from the heroine Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend, Isabel, "La Comtesse de Feuillide", may have come about as nightly readings by the young Jane in the Austen home. Love and Friendship (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 Friendship and Betrayed in Love", which completely undercuts the title.

In form, it resembles a fairy tale as much as anything else, featuring wild coincidences and turns of fortune, but Austen is determined to lampoon the conventions of romantic stories, right down to the utter failure of romantic fainting spells, which always turn out badly for the female characters.