Love and Freindship

Austen's hilarious early stories and sketches, now collected in one gorgeous clothbound volume Jane Austen's earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven-years-old, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work. But it is also a product of the times in which she grew up--dark, grotesque, often surprisingly bawdy, and a far cry from the polished, sparkling novels of manners for which she became famous. Drunken heroines, babies who bite off their mothers' fingers, and a letter-writer who has murdered her whole family all feature in these highly spirited pieces. This edition includes all of Austen's juvenilia, including her "History of England" and the novella Lady Susan, in which the anti-heroine schemes and cheats her way through high society. Spirited, easy, full of fun verging with freedom upon sheer nonsense...At fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself -- Virginia Woolf [Her] inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter -- G. K. Chesterton