Love and Freindship [sic]

These are the writings of Jane Austen as a teenager, full of the mischief she later refined. In Love and Freindship, written at fourteen in letters, the heroine Laura tells of her adventures with her equally sensitive friend Sophia: they faint, weep and run mad at every opportunity, steal money with a clear conscience and despise anyone with common sense ('Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint'). The volume also contains Lesley Castle, the comic History of England 'by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian', and other short pieces.

Austen wrote these pieces around 1790 to amuse her family; they were published only in 1922. They mock the sentimental novels of her day, a theme she returned to in Northanger Abbey. Her short novel in letters, written a little later, is Lady Susan.

Jane Austen (1775–1817) grew up in a crowded rectory in the Hampshire village of Steventon, the seventh of eight children, writing comic sketches to amuse her family. She never married, lived quietly in Bath and then in a cottage at Chawton, and published her novels anonymously, signed only 'By a Lady'. She died in Winchester at forty-one.

Her six novels, from Pride and Prejudice to Emma and Persuasion, turn the small world of country families, marriages and money into sharp, funny studies of character. Her ironic narration, slipping in and out of her heroines' thoughts, changed the way novels are written.