New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1922-09-24

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP AND OTHER
EARLY WORKS BY Jane Austen.
%M% HE practice of unearthing the
n unknown works Of famous au-
thors and Of giving it to the
world has not always proved
the happiest kind of experiment. But
il has been abundantiy justified by the
results in the case Of publication Of the
manuscripts which represents the ear
lest literary efforts of Jane Austen.
The sketches which make up Love and
Friendship" which Miss Austen is said
to have written at the age Of seven
teen, are not only delightful IN them
selves but are extremely significant as
regards Miss Austen's methods and the
temper of her mind. 1t is very interest
ing that the first thing Jane Austen
wrote should have been satire upon
the type of romantic novel which had
so great vogue in her own day.
Love and Freindship" at first glance
might seem nothing more than an
adroit parody on the exaggerated SEN
timentality of contemporary fiction;
such as clever girl in the solitude
of country rectory might concoct for
her own amusement. But IL Is 1mpor-
tant, not only because flashes of the
"Pride and Prejudice" are present in
it, but because it demonstrates so
clearly that Jane Austen was probably
the keenest satirist and the most re-
lentless opponent of the romantic
school in all English literature.
The eighteenth century, the age Of
reason and good sense, had, like less
we'll regulated epochs, its alterations
and it's deviations from it's accepted
standards. One Of the strangest Of
these was embodied in what has been
very aptly called the Gothic romance;
which first made its appearance in 1854
with Horace Walpoles Castle of
Otranto," the forerunner Of a school Of
fiction which endured until the open
ing of the nineteenth century and Of
which those once celebrated books,
Mrs. Radclif's "Mysteries of Udolpho"
and "The Monk" by Matthew Lewis,
were typical products,
Jane Austen lived at the time when
the kind of novel to which her own
works afforded the most complete con-
trast was at the very height of its
popularity. The Gothic romance, that
extraordinary union Of the senti-
mental and the supernatural, afforded
Jane Austen, who had no sympathy
with sentimentality and no interest in
Iuc super an uIlSQI pdSSEU OPP
portunity for the display of her match
less irony. And Miss Austen was not
the woman to overlook an opportunity
to be ironical. She wrote "Northanger
Abbey" as a deliberate satire on the
prevailing mode of fiction, with it's
pariphernalia of fainting heroines, de-
sparlng lovers, tyrannical parents and
nocturnal mysteries, and her maiden
effort, Love and Friendship" was
burlesque upon the same theme.
In Love and Friendship" and the
other pieces that make up the book the
arrows of Miss Austens wit are aimed
at all the stock figures of contemporary
romance. The extreme sensibility Of
its heroines is ridiculcd in a passage
in which Laura, the heroine of Love
and Friendship" narrates her own be-
havior and that OF her friend Sophia at
one of the crises, which occurred with
such monotonous frequency in the ca
reers of the heroines of eighteenth
century novels.
Sophia shrieked and tainted on the
ground. | screamed and went instantly
mad. We remained thus mutually de
prived of our senses some minutes,