Recently, for the 250 anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, a group of Newnham undergraduates organised a day of celebrations in the Old Labs in Newnham. We had tea and talks, cake and country dance, and we read ‘Love & Freindship’aloud together, as God and Austen had intended. The greatness of this short novella is that, along with many of Austen’s ‘Juvenilia’, it feels like a satire of her more mature and well-loved works. Laura’s description of her depth of feeling anticipates and rivals Marianne Dashwood’s “A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my friends, my acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my fault, if a fault it could be called.” The romance is there, along with the scathing study of recklessness, wickedness, greed, but it’s all — eye-wateringly — funnier.

First published in Juvenilia, Chatto and Windus, 1922