Here is Laura on an older man, her husband’s father:įor what could be expected from a Man who possessed not the smallest atom of Sensibility, who scarcely knew the meaning of Simpathy, and who actually snored.Īnd here is Marianne, in love with the dashing Willoughby, on Colonel Brandon: Now I’m going to be lazy and simply illustrate Austen’s changed approach with some comparative examples.

Pride and Prejudice’s Lydia could perhaps be seen as Laura’s true heir: Lydia is not described in quite the same terms as Laura, but she certainly pays no credence to anything remotely sensible. (Intriguingly the recipient of Laura’s letters is a Marianne. There are, for example, obvious similarities between Laura, here, Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey and Marianne in Sense and sensibility, but Laura’s complete refusal to recognise that sense has any place in her life is modified in Catherine and Marianne who learn through experience that their imagination and sensibilities, if left uncurbed, can get them into trouble.

But what is exaggerated and parodied in Love and freindship become more considered subjects in her first novels, Northanger Abbey and Sense and sensibility. The most obvious of these in Love and freindship was the late eighteenth century’s cult of sensibility, which involved the favouring of sensibility over sense, the fostering of an overactive imagination (as evidenced by the popularity of Gothic novels). The thing that concerned her most was to make fun of silly or ridiculous people and ideas. Or is it? This is the point I’d like to explore a little in my post, because there are many seeds here of the writer Austen was becoming – of the things that were to concern her and of the style she was developing. This doesn’t sound much like the writer described by Charlotte Bronte as “sensible and suitable” does it? And, in fact, this wildly improbable, effusive story isn’t much like her. What follows is a melodramatic story of sudden friendships, quick-not-always legal marriages, and wild coincidences, accompanied by much fainting and “running mad”. Laura, while rejecting that she is too old for such “unmerited” misfortunes, agrees to tell her story to Isabella’s daughter Marianne as a “useful lesson”. It commences with a letter in which Isabella asks her friend Laura to tell her daughter “the Misfortunes and Adventures” of her Life. “You are this day 55”, she says, and surely now safe “from the determined Perseverance of disagreeable Lovers and the cruel Persecutions of obstinate Fathers”. It’s the illuminating part that I plan to focus on here.īut first, a little about the plot. So it is that I have just – for my local Jane Austen group – reread Love and freindship (sic), the short epistolary novel she wrote in her 15th year. You read her letters, her unfinished works and her juvenilia. If you are a Jane Austen fan, you don’t just read her six novels.

Jane austen love & friendship