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Title:
A Collection of Letters
Series:
----------
Author: Jane Austen
Rating:
3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Juvenilia short story
Pages:
32
Words: 10K
Publish: 1789
This was
tantalizing. Austen wrote 5 letters at the age of 14. Each letter is
not connected to the other and tells a very short story, or at least
lets us get a glimpse of a story in progress. Most of the names we
have come to know in her novels make an appearance here and I must
say, it was wicked weird for me to see “Willoughby” as a good
guy.
Part of me
wishes I had read this whole Juvenilia collection as a whole (I still
have more to go) but the other part is glad I am reading just bits
and pieces. It keeps it from blending all together into a one big
slurry.
★★★☆☆
From
The Internet:
A
Collection of Letters is an epistolary short story collection written
by Jane Austen when she was fourteen years old. Although the novels
Austen became known for were not published until she was in her
thirties, she was an active writer from the age of twelve, frequently
composing epistolary works such as A Collection of Letters. Austen
eventually compiled 29 of her early writings in three notebooks that
became known as the Juvenilia and that she called “Volume the
First”, “Volume the Second”, and “Volume the Third”,
including A Collection of Letters in “Volume the Second”.
A
Collection of Letters is set contemporaneously to Austen’s writing
and consists of a series of five letters, each written by a woman of
high society living in Great Britain. Unlike Austen’s later
epistolary works, A Collection of Letters is not a novelette; each of
these five letters tells a self-contained story, with no characters
appearing in multiple letters. Nonetheless, the collection is unified
in its lighthearted, humorous tone. Austen dedicated A Collection of
Letters to her cousin Jane Cooper, who married famed Royal Navy
officer Thomas Williams two years later and who died in a horse
accident before the end of that decade; Williams went on to marry
again twice, reputedly because his first marriage was so happy.
Ironically, there are multiple parallels between Cooper’s later
life and the second letter of this collection.
Letter
the First
Letter
the Second
Letter
the Third
Letter
the Fourth
Letter
the Fifth
