Love and Freindship
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Author | Jane Austen |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publication date | c. 1790 |
Publication place | UK |
Love and Freindship [sic] is a juvenile story by Jane Austen, dated 1790. While aged 11–18, Austen wrote her tales in three notebooks. These still exist, one in the Bodleian Library and the other two in the British Museum. They contain, among other works, Love and Freindship, written when she was 14, and The History of England, written at 15.
Scholars consider it a significant milestone in Austen's development as a novelist, particularly in its parody of the novel of sensibility.
Overview
[edit]Written in epistolary form like her later unpublished novella Lady Susan, Love and Freindship is thought to be one of the tales she wrote for the amusement of her family.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, known as "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, and is generally left uncorrected) 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 undercuts the title.
In form, the story resembles a fairy tale in featuring wild coincidences and turns of fortune, but Austen is determined to lampoon the conventions of romantic stories, down to the utter failure of romantic fainting spells, which always turn out badly for the female characters. The story shows the development of Austen's sharp wit and disdain for romantic sensibility, characteristic of her later novels.
The 2016 film Love & Friendship is a film version of Lady Susan, borrowing only the (spelling-corrected) title from Love and Freindship.
Synopsis
[edit]In an exchange of letters, Isabel asks Laura to share her life story with Isabel's daughter Marianne, suggesting that at fifty-five years of age, Laura is now safe from the travails of love. Laura bristles a little at this reference to her age but agrees to write to Marianne to convey useful life lessons.
In her initial letters, Laura recounts her youth living happily with her parents. Her peaceful existence, however, was disrupted when a handsome young man named Edward Lindsey arrived at their door one evening. Edward immediately proposed marriage, and she accepted immediately.
Edward was the son of a baronet who was supposed to marry someone else, but he deliberately disobeyed his father's wishes. At first, the marriage was happy.
The couple then visited Edward's friends, Augustus and Sophia, who also defied their parents to marry. Augustus had stolen money from his father before eloping with Sophia, but at the time of the visit, were broke and in substantial debt. Laura and Sophia became instant friends, attracted to one another because both were creatures of sensibility, demonstrated by their fainting together on a sofa.
Laura further explains that Augustus was arrested for his unpaid debts. Edward left to help his friend but did not return. Laura and Sophia decided to flee to escape debt. They briefly traveled to London seeking Augustus, but Sophia felt that she could not see him in distress, so they moved on to Scotland, hoping for assistance from Sophia’s relatives.
At an inn, the women encounter the elderly Lord St. Clair, whom Laura senses was her grandfather. Lord St. Clair acknowledged both Laura and Sophia as his long-lost granddaughters from different daughters. Two young men also appeared and were recognized as additional grandchildren. Lord St. Clair gave each grandchild money and left immediately.
Laura and Sophia again fainted, and when they woke up, the male grandchildren were gone. They continued to the home of Sophia's cousin, Macdonald, where they tried to breakup his daughter Janetta's engagement because he lacked the qualities of a hero of sensibility; they convinced her to elope with Captain M'Kenzie instead, even though he seems to be merely a fortune-hunter.
Laura and Sophia decided to steal from Macdonald. When they were caught, they told him about the elopement of his daughter, and he kicked them out of his house. After they walked some distance, they saw a carriage accident, and the victims were Edward and Augustus. Edward briefly regained consciousness and died. Sophia continually fainted in horror, and died from the cold that she contracted from the dew.
Themes
[edit]Scholars have frequently pointed out Austen's critique of the novel of Sensibility. Juliet McMaster argues that Austen has the heroines dramatically faint and exhibit exaggerated emotional responses, highlighting the absurdity of the typical behavior of sentimental heroines.[1] Scholars have disagreed over Austen's perspective in critiquing sensibility. Marilyn Butler, who sees Austen as an "Anti-Jacobin" conservative, argues that Austen is critiquing sensibility's emphasis on individualism that sees no limits to its reach, as Laura is "aware only of those others so similar in tastes and temperament that she can think of them only as extensions of herself."[2] For Butler, Austen sees positive self-development as necessarily constrained by the customs and rules of society. By contrast, Peter Knox-Shaw argues that the novella's "satire belongs to a revolution that is liberal in character."[3] Knox-Shaw maintains that Austen is not criticizing sensibility's emphasis on individualism and sympathy, but rather the excessive reliance of them. For Knox-Shaw, Austen is clearly writing her burlesque in the context of Enlightenment criticisms of an exclusive reliance on emotions, but not disavowing the importance of these emotions in a well-ordered, virtuous life.
Notes
[edit]- ^ McMaster, Juliet (2022). "The Feeling Body: From Love and Freindship to Sense and Sensibility". Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal. 44: 133–145 – via Gale Literature Resource Center.
- ^ Butler, Marilyn (1990). Jane Austen and the war of ideas. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press. p. 169. ISBN 978-0-19-812968-4.
- ^ Knox-Shaw, Peter (2004). Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-521-84346-1.
References
[edit]- Jane Austen, "Love and Freindship". The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006
- Edward Copeland Juliet McMaster, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997
- William Deresiewicz, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004
- Laura C. Lambdin Robert T. Lambdin, A Companion to Jane Austen Studies, Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000
- Paul Poplawski, A Jane Austen Encyclopedia, West Port: Greenwood Press, 1998
- Reeta Sahney, Jane Austen's Heroes and Other Male Characters: A Sociological Study, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1990
- Brian C. Southam, Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist's Development, New York: The Athlone Press, 2001
- Dennis Walder, The Realist Novel, New York: The Open University, 1995
External links
[edit]- Love and Freindship at Project Gutenberg
Love and Freindship public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- Love and Freindship. (Flash version).
- Love and Freindship – PDF edition.