Love and Freindship

Before Pride and Prejudice, there was a teenager in a Hampshire parsonage writing deliriously silly stories to make her family laugh. Love and Freindship (the misspelling is hers, and she kept it) is the gem of Jane Austen's juvenilia: a short novel in letters in which two heroines faint on sofas at every crisis, applaud each other for stealing money on principle, and pursue Sensibility to its logical, ridiculous end. It is a merciless parody of the sentimental fiction of the 1780s, written by a fourteen-year-old who had already seen through all of it.

The collection pairs it with other early sketches, including her gloriously biased History of England 'by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian.' None of it is polished Austen, and that's the appeal: this is her comic instinct running wild without a plot to restrain it. Short, absurd, and laugh-out-loud funny, ideal for a listen when you want Austen's wit at its most concentrated.

At roughly 35,300 words, Love and Freindship runs about 4 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

1. Install LoudReader on iPhone or iPad, or its iPad app on a compatible Apple Silicon Mac.
2. Search for “Love and Freindship” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

Speech is generated locally without uploading the book for narration. Download the book and check your chosen voice before travelling offline. Available voices depend on your device; check the in-app voice list. Try every available voice for your first 8 hours of listening. Afterwards, keep a free English voice selection and unlimited book listening. No LoudReader account or word quota.