Love and Freindship : And Other Youthful Writings

'They flew into each other's arms - It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself - We fainted Alternately on a Sofa'

This sparkling collection of Austen's early writings - some penned when she was just eleven years old - is playful, subversive and shot through with wit. Here are bawdy sketches, short tales, imagined letters and miniature histories in which vain, egotistical men forget their own wives, drunken young women slander and poison their competition, and one woman accepts two marriage proposals for fear of causing offence. Also featured is the novella 'Lady Susan', telling of an adulterous aristocrat who manipulates and deceives those around her for personal gain. Delighting in nonsense and wordplay, these riotous pieces reveal Austen's dark, anarchic young imagination.

Edited and with an introduction and notes by Christine Alexander

About the Author

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775. In her youth she wrote many burlesques, parodies and other stories, including a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan. The novels published in her lifetime include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Persuasion was written in a race against failing health, and was published, together with Northanger Abbey, posthumously in 1818. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817.

About the Editor

Christine Alexander is Scientia Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, general editor of the Juvenilia Press and co-editor of The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (2005).