Their claims of intimacy are burlesqued by their deeply unladylike conduct towards each other: “From this period,” Austen writes, Here she gleefully mocks the conventions of sentimental novels (then very much in vogue) by writing a group of young women who fall into raptures of adoring friendship the moment they see each other, who are constantly obliging one another with snatches of trite pastoral song, and one of whom accepts two marriage proposals so as not to cause offense to either suitor. She was supposedly an excellent mimic, loved parlor games and charades, and that vivacious goofiness is so evident in pieces like “Frederic and Elfrida”. The stories from her pre-teen and early teenaged years are surprisingly excellent, however, because they give a sense of how unbounded and anarchic her imagination was. The advantage, obviously, is that you can see how Austen grew and developed, not just in terms of her prose becoming more complex and easily controlled, but also as she became more confident in her ability to handle a plot and as her satire became no less sharp, but significantly more subtle. Christine Alexander, the editor of the Penguin volume, has laid them out in rough chronological order (more or less as they appear in Austen’s manuscript books). This book is a collection of Austen’s juvenilia, work written when she was between the ages of eleven and nineteen.

Consensus on Austen for a while now has generally been that she was a shrewd and uncompromising chronicler of human hypocrisy and frailty that she wrote with absolute clarity on the myriad foolishnesses of polite society but also that she understood them inside out and that her “charming” marriage-based plots are a forensic examination of the legalized system of prostitution that found it acceptable to sell unmarried women to the highest bidder-and in which the women in question frequently colluded because their other choices were homelessness or humiliation as “companion” dependents of wealthier families. The truth, of course, is less frilly and floral than the background for the photo above would suggest. Jane Austen has basically always gotten a rough shake, because literary misogyny exists and anyone who writes about bonnets is always going to find herself dismissed by one half of humanity and read feverishly-but only for the bonnets-by half of the other half. Since such Sir is my character, what do you mean by wishing me to marry your Daughter? My temper is even, my virtues innumerable, my self unparalleled. April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.

The Great Reread, #6: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer.

May 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.

Love & freindship jane austen