Customer Reviews

Love and Friendship (A collection of Juvenile Writings)

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This is a collection of short stories, drama, humor, and other works written by Jane Austen at least a decade before her major novels. It is a series of letters and other works that Austen wrote, and they show a free spirited Austen, quite unlike her formula books that came later. As a read this is not what one would call great literature, but it is worthwhile to see a young Jane Austen writing without constraints, and writing as a young woman years before her fame.

As background information, I have read all of Austen's novels and I have read various analyses of Austen's work. Jane Austen's formula for success was to write a novel about of a financially disadvantaged young woman who meets and marries a wealthier man. The exception is her novel "Emma" where the protagonist has her own means. There are no axe murderers in an Austen novel or any nasty elements. Her stories take place in small English towns and they all have a variety of characters including a few willful women and usually one male rogue.

"Pride and Prejudice" is Jane Austen's finest novel. That book is the perfect balance of story, prose, structure, and interesting characters. It evokes many emotional responses in the reader. That novel is among the greatest novels of all time on par with for example Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" or Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." From a strictly literary point of view, "Mansfield Park" is the most complicated and sophisticated literary work penned by Austen. Many like "Emma" as well.

The present work pre-dates her success and one can view it as her practicing her craft or simply developing as a writer. She will surprise most with the amount of humor that she manages to inject into the stories. The stories are short, some less than a page. Also, she has written bits of drama and humorous pieces which are included. I liked her brief humorous descriptions of the various kings and queens of England.

Most Austen fans will think the pieces to be very interesting but short. In any case, we see a completely different Austen here, and she writes with few self imposed limits. It is nothing like her later writings which tend to follow a formula.

As a note, the text is available free on line at the Gutenberg Project, and since it is so short it can be easily down-loaded.

Please note (see comment from the editor of B&R Samizdat Express below) that Amazon applies reviews to multiple versions of books - this review applied ONLY to the version of the book published by General Books LLC, not to versions from any other publishers.

One of the versions available is published by "General Books LLC." General Books LLC is an imprint of VDM Publishing, (google them and take a look at the Wikipedia article on them). VDM Publishing publish books that are free of copyright with no editing or quality control. Some quotes from the publishers website will explain more:

"We created your book using OCR software that includes an automated spell check. Our OCR software is 99 percent accurate if the book is in good condition. However, with up to 3,500 characters per page, even one percent can be an annoying number of typos....

After we re-typeset and designed your book, the page numbers change so the old index and table of contents no longer work. Therefore, we usually remove them. Since many of our books only sell a couple of copies, manually creating a new index and table of contents could add more than a hundred dollars to the cover price....

Our OCR software can't distinguish between an illustration and a smudge or library stamp so it ignores everything except type. We would really like to manually scan and add the illustrations. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies....

We created your book using a robot who turned and photographed each page. Our robot is 99 percent accurate. But sometimes two pages stick together. And sometimes a page may even be missing from our copy of the book. We would really like to manually scan each page and buy multiple copies of each original. But many of our books only sell a couple of copies..... "

What you're getting from General Books LLC is a scanned in, unedited, low quality unindexed / No table of contents book at a higher price than many of the other imprints available. VDM Publishing is flooding Amazon with these and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with better quality versions associated with them. The product description is misleading for the buyer that's not aware of this publisher.

Totally unethical marketing.