One of Jane Austen's Juvenilia productions, Love and Freindship was written when its author was only fourteen years old (1789-90); it was one of many early short works and the first of an epistolary triptych that also includes A Collection of Letters (1791) and Lady Susan (1793-94). Three notebooks, entitled Volume the First, Volume the Second and Volume the Third, were written by Austen between 1787 and 1793, probably to entertain her family and as part of her education by her father. Coincidentally they also discovered her extraordinary talent and prepared her for her later writing.
Love and Freindship is fundamentally a highly amusing burlesque of current literary fashions, written in the form of a series of letters from Laura to Marianne. Its epigraph reads “Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love”, a good indication...
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Citation: Schneider, Ana-Karina. "Love and Freindship". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 March 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3832, accessed 09 June 2026.]
