Love and Friendship E-Book

Jane Austen.

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 134

Beschreibung

Only single-volume edition available of this exciting dramatic early novella which is an unknown work for Jane Austen's many fans. Written in a series of letters to the daughter of a friend, Love and Friendship tells of a young girl's path to betrayal, by way of a seemingly ecstatic marriage.

Leseprobe

Love and Friendship

Jane Austen

CONTENTS

Title PageForeword by Fay WeldonLove and FriendshipThe Three SistersA Collection of LettersBiographical noteHesperus PressFull list of titles in The Hesperus Anniversary Reprints SeriesHesperus Press BestsellersNon-FictionCopyright

FOREWORD

What a delightful volume this is – Jane Austen on the lives and loves of teenage girls, in two short epistolary novels and five brilliant short stories written in letter form, and so hitherto neglected. And whatever’s changed in the last two hundred years? These are the same young girls we know today – monsters of hypocrisy while doing their best to be good – moaning, accusing, forgiving, giggling, weeping, fainting, screaming in delight or outrage, who’s to tell; one moment seducing, the next spurning; kind and cruel by turns, intuitive yet obtuse; wholly resistant to parental advice, hopelessly noisy, and in general able to charm and appal within the hour. These days they use mobile phones the better to live in a flurry of excitement: two centuries back they had to content themselves with writing letters. (Mind you, a letter sent one day got there the next: those were the days!)

Jane Austen wrote the works in this book when she herself was in her teens, fresh to the task of writing fiction. She recorded the fitful and whimsical awfulness of her contemporaries with the same exquisite intelligence, mirthful good humour and elegance of style as when she was writing the five great novels of her twenties and thirties. An education in the classics, which she was fortunate enough to have – her clergyman father taught her Latin and Greek – was still fresh in her mind; the rhythm of the prose falls naturally into cadences of three. ‘I hope you like my determination; I can think of nothing better; and am your ever affectionate – Mary Stanhope,’ writes her wilful heroine in The Three Sisters. (See, it’s infectious. What did I just write? – ‘exquisite intelligence, mirthful good humour and elegance of style’. Always the cadence of three, as a chord resolves.) If all within is in letter form, perhaps it’s because (like texting today) the letter comes so naturally to the young, along with, in Austen’s case, the pure joy – nothing purer – of invention. This is exhilarating, energising writing: the writer seems in love with her new-found ability. The reader laughs aloud, and yet feels a kind of melancholy for the loss of youth and if not exactly innocence – for these young heroines of Austen’s are far from innocent – then the bravado, courage and hope that go with being young and silly. As we read, the sense of our lives as a continuous stream from then to now is very strong indeed. Austen is trapped in these pages as a girl, but we know her to have died young, and that is sad.

Austen’s early works tend to be dismissed as juvenilia: they should not be. True, she was certainly very young, fourteen when, in 1790, she wrote Love and Freindship, kindly corrected by the posthumous publishers to ‘Friendship’, but I believe ‘Freindship’ has its own charm and who is to say it was not a deliberate mistake, since Laura, its heroine, was the one writing the letters? One imagines the teenage Jane Austen sitting there by the fire, reading aloud to her family, as was her custom; they will have cut her down to size with gentle mockery, no doubt, rather as she tends to do with her own characters. As you are done by, so you do. ‘Jane,’ perhaps they will have said, ‘really, you can’t have quite so much swooning away in a book, it’s too absurd, even though your friends may have a tendency to it in real life. And perhaps it is not quite the kind of thing you should be writing – best to write about what you know, surely. Not this rather wild invention. You don’t find this kind of thing in serious books, only in trash, which to our minds you read too much of anyway. And look here, you’ve spelled friendship wrong. It’s i before e except after c…’ and Jane will have retreated, hurt, to fight again another day.

But to my mind there is very little juvenile about these early works other than their subject matter and the odd spelling mistake at a time when spelling was not yet so highly regularised as it is today. The prescience of an early death seemed to hothouse the writers of her generation, as it did her. There was little time to practise. You got it right first time round. Death could come early.

Of her more or less coevals, Shelley died at the age of thirty, in 1822, leaving a great body of work behind him. (His child bride Mary began work on Frankenstein when she was eighteen, and no one could describe that monster work as juvenilia.) Byron died at the age of thirty-six, in 1824. Keats at the age of twenty-six, in 1821. Jane Austen, born in 1775, made it to forty-one – doing rather better than the rest of them, but then she lived more quietly, without drink, drugs or wild spouse.

The novella Love and Friendship is a romp through an episode of runaway teenage life. It is said to be a burlesque of Richardson’s epistolary novels Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, but these were written some forty years before Austen began the oeuvre of her fifteenth year. I have no doubt she had read enough contemporary kitchen-table novels by that time to get her going without recourse to Richardson. Kitchen-table novels, so called because they were seen as fit only for servant girls – these days I suppose we could call it kitch-lit – were not so very different from our chick-lit. Our version is designed to be read, not in someone else’s kitchen in the few precious hours off, but on public transport on the way to the office, or on holiday in the sun: it serves the same purpose all the same: it fills the head with dreams of love.

Kitch-lit uses Gothic backgrounds, castles and mists and lonely cottages on the moor – who knows what danger lurks within, but still the heroine ventures out – and the underlying fear is more real. It is of starvation, abduction, false marriage and ravishment. Chick-lit uses loft spaces and family homes as background, and the fear is of social humiliation, sexual harassment behind the filing cabinet, or Rohypnol at the wine bar: the hope is the same – of marriage and happiness ever after.

Pride and Prejudice, written in 1822 – women’s favourite novel of all time, according to a recent BBC poll – and normally listed amongst the five major Austen novels, remains to my mind kitch-lit: it’s a simple romance, poor-girl Elizabeth gets rich-boy Darcy in the most unlikely fashion. But the plot is not the point. It is the lively use of language, the sense of the keen, desperate intelligence, already to be found in the earlier Love and Friendship, which so delights – added of course to the brilliance and familiarity of the subsidiary characters. We all know a living Mr Bennett, a Mr Collins, a Lady de Burgh, only too well – just as, as children, we knew all too well their animal equivalents in the books we loved, The House at Pooh Corner, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland – Eeyore, Tigger, Badger, Toad, White Rabbit and the Dormouse – all alive and well and living around the corner. It is precisely because so little changes when it comes to human nature, and those who can delineate it in fiction are so rare, that books from the past remain relevant, loved, read and reread over the centuries. Jane Austen’s original readers might have read by candle and lamplight, their successors by gaslight, and we in the brilliance of halogen, but her text remains the same and we are in fellowship with the past when we read.

That wicked, thieving, unscrupulous and forever fainting pair, Laura and Sophia, in Love and Friendship are a glorious invention. They fainted to the great detriment of their health, of course: in Sophia’s last words to Laura she beseeches her friend to beware of fainting fits: ‘Though at the time they may be refreshing and agreeable, yet believe me, they will, in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your constitution.’ Fainting among girls may not be as fashionable as once it was, these being the days of women’s empowerment, but I remember a time when there was an epidemic of it at my own girls’ high-school, and refreshing and agreeable fainting was, I recall, just as Austen describes it – the swoony blacking-out, the helplessness, the crumpling – most sensuous. More and more girls each day had to be dragged out unconscious, to recover presently, without apparent ill effects, once in the fresh air. Local health officers were brought in, parents panicked, the school was about to close. Then the headmistress lost her temper and said to all assembled: ‘Any girl who faints will get a detention,’ and the outbreak stopped as quickly as it began. But this is by the way.

It is supposed that Northanger Abbey, published posthumously in 1817, was the book Austen worked on after finishing with Love and Friendship, though no one can of course be sure. It is certain that by the time Jane Austen had finished it – there was more to her life than writing, as her letters to her sister Cassandra attest; there were balls to go to, bonnets to buy and trim, friends and family to visit, she couldn’t be always writing (what was it someone said to the historian Edward Gibbon of that massive work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ‘Still scribbling away, Mr Gibbon?’) – our new heroine has grown up, cleaned up her act, keeps good company, never faints, and though still hopelessly influenced by bad novels, is practically as respectable a girl as Bridget Jones.

Jane Austen was, alas, always being advised to ‘write about what she knew’. Men were encouraged to invent, not so women. Who knew into what alarming and indecent lands of fantasy the female novelist might not wander, if left unchecked? A reviewer of Northanger Abbey wrote complaining that General Tilney seemed to have been drawn from the imagination, ‘for it is not a very probable character, and is not portrayed with our authoress’ usual taste and judgement’. A matter of taste, then. And another critic wrote, ‘This is the forte of our authoress: as soon as ever she leaves the shores of her own experience, and attempts to delineate fancy characters she falls at once to the level of mere ordinary novelists. Her merit consists altogether in her remarkable talent for observation’ – and then goes on to complain about Austen’s want of imagination! I fear Jane Austen took this kind of comment too much to heart. Her fancy wanders widely enough in Love and Friendship, the early Lady Susan, and to a smaller degree in Northanger Abbey. But had she not listened, not drawn back, not restricted herself to what she knew, or had she lived in the same social milieu as the Shelley set, say, or run off with a toy boy, Lord Byron, and so known more, what might she not have written? The Prince Regent, an admirer of Ms Austen’s work, and perhaps not realising quite what a satirist she was, wanted her to write for him ‘a historical romance based on the House of Saxe-Coburg’, but she politely replied that though ‘it might be more to the purpose of profit and popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in, I could no more write a romance than an epic poem.’ I do rather wish she had said yes, not no. It would have got her out and about more. I know this is heresy; Jane Austen is the darling of the quiet and retiring everywhere. But she might even have met a charming prince in the course of her researches. (And that’s even a worse heresy, for who is to say that the single woman has a worse time of it than a wife?) And we must of course be grateful for what we have: that her father consented to send Pride and Prejudice to Mr Thomas Egerton the publisher, who rather reluctantly agreed to publish it (a Mr Cadell having earlier turned it down), and that sister Cassandra did not burn the manuscript of Northanger Abbey and the juvenilia, as she did so many of Jane’s letters.

The five fictional letters in this volume, very much ignored by critics to date, turn out to be a collection of five just about perfect short stories, true to the classic form, punchlines and all. In the brief From a Young Lady Rather Impertinent to Her Friend the story ends so neatly and with such a graceful bathos: ‘This was an answer I did not expect – I was quite silenced, and never felt so awkward in my life.’ The more remarkable that they are practically the first of their kind, written by the young Austen at a time when the short story scarcely existed at all. The ‘short story’ did not begin to appear until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Walter Scott got going, and, in America, Washington Irvine, Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, and, in Germany, Goethe and Meyer. And here we have Jane Austen, not yet seventeen, quietly getting on with the new form from first principles. Of course there was Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, centuries before – there is nothing entirely new under the sun – but those rude verses were hardly Austen territory. She did it by instinct – writing in letter form because that’s all she’d done to date: you can say a great deal in a very short space of time. Let’s try it: set up your characters, set the scene, make your point and get out, she’d have thought, sitting up in bed one morning. Something halfway between a poem and a novel. Or, as Edgar Allan Poe defined it in 1842, rather more elaborately, and having perhaps imagined that he had discovered the form – ‘a short story is a prose narrative requiring anything from half an hour or one or two hours in perusal: a story that concentrates upon a unique and single effect and one in which the quality of effect is the main objective. In the end the form has shown itself to be so flexible and susceptible of so much variety that its possibilities seem almost endless.’

Your foreword writer has a collection or so of short stories to her name, but must admit that once when teaching Creative Writing – that unteachable subject – at the Sydney Institute of Technology (and what an astonishingly bright lot of students they were, knowing much more about the theory of writing than I ever did) they complained that mine were not short stories at all, were not true to the form as they had been taught it, and I had no business thus describing them. I should have quoted Edgar Allan Poe at them – ‘its possibilities are endless’ – and not have just said crossly that so far as I was concerned a short story was a story that stopped in a short time. Adding to annoy, what’s more, that a poem was simply prose that never got to the end of the page. But I digress.

Also in the letters, besides the perfect punchlines, are the embryonic form of later novels – Lady Greville in Letter the Third, from a Young Lady in Distressed Circumstances is an early sketch of Lady Catherine de Burgh in Pride and Prejudice. In Letter the First, from a Mother to Her Friend, here’s poor vulgar Mrs Bennett, that much put-upon lady (I speak as one who frequently has the vapours). Alas, what Jane Austen had Mrs Bennett forecast for her daughters if they didn’t marry, and was laughed at for her pains, came true for the Austen daughters: the Revd Austen dies, the house is entailed away, the little family of women are left homeless and penniless, and are obliged to live by the grace and favour of relatives. I daresay Jane Austen saw the irony in this, and found it painful.