Feelings

By Paul Gray

LOVE AND FREINDSHIP, AND

OTHER EARLY WORKS

by Jane Austen

Harmony Books; 118 pages; $8.95

For all their current popularity and lubricity, novel-romances are old, old stories. They began flooding the market in England during the last decades of the 18th century; they were part of the tide that engulfed the certainties of the Enlightenment. Unlike the newly invented gothic tale, which stressed the pleasures of terror, the sentimental romances emphasized the happy sensation of a good cry. They also quickly debased the emerging philosophical notion that feelings were the most reliable guide to truth. If so, reasoned the romancers, then the person with the most flamboyantly acute sensitivities must be better than less hysterical mortals. The novels that followed from this conclusion all had one thing in common: they portrayed selfish monstrosities as paragons of virtue.

At least one good girl was not ruined by these books, although she must have read a lot of them to mock so well. Before her 15th birthday in 1790, Jane Austen had written Love and Freindship, erratic spellings and all, into a notebook. There it remained until after her death in 1817; it has appeared infrequently ever since. Too bad. Had this impeccable satire been published at once, a number of sentimental novelists might have found themselves legitimately in tears.

Love and Freindship is short (some 30 printed pages) and hilariously to the point. It consists of a series of letters from Laura to the daughter of a childhood "freind." Laura pours out the story of her unhappy past and makes herself ridiculous with nearly every vapid word she utters. She complains: "A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Freinds, my Acquaintance and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called."

She is, like so many romance heroines, too good for this world, and horrid beyond measure.

Austen rapidly trots Laura through a standard romance plot. She marries a handsome stranger named Edward, moments after he appears at her parents' house. Edward is running away from his father, who wants him to marry a certain Lady Dorothea; he tells the adoring Laura how he refused: "Lady Dorothea is lovely and Engaging; I prefer no woman to her; but know Sir, that I scorn to marry her in compliance with your wishes. No! Never shall it be said that I obliged my Father." Edward and Laura set off to pamper their emotions and sponge off relatives and friends: "The affectionate entreaties of Augustus and Sophia that we would for ever consider their House as our Home, easily prevailed on us to determine never more to leave them."

Eavesdropping follows, as do miraculous reunions, grand larceny, imprisonment, overturned carriages and the untimely deaths of nearly everyone except Laura.

Austen exaggerates nothing; given her target she scarcely had to. But she brings to this item of juvenilia the mark of an accomplished satirist: she sets foolishness off against an implied moral world. Near the end of her narrative, Laura recalls meeting a plain girl named Bridget: "She could not be supposed to possess either exalted Ideas, Delicate Feelings or refined Sensibilities -- She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil & obliging Young Woman ..." To her later glory, Jane Austen was to make a lasting place in English fiction for such plain creatures.

The other short pieces in this convenient collection betray an apprentice, if decidedly precocious writer. But Love and Freindship is a miracle of maturity, and one of the wittiest send-ups of nonsense in the English language. --By Paul Gray

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