A comic
novella by the young
Jane Austen, the second entry in
Volume the First, one of three volumes of
juvenilia she preserved, and composed somewhere between the ages of 12 and 18. It is, like her other youthful works, a
parody of the conventional style of
polite novel. Its language is exceedingly proper and its plot
almost ordinary, until she veers into sudden excess, and veers out again as if nothing had happened.
Mr and Mrs Jones were both rather tall and very passionate, but were in other respects good-tempered, well-behaved people. Charles Adams was an amiable, accomplished, and bewitching young man, of so dazzling a beauty that none but eagles could look him in the face.
There are three sisters, one the picture of
ambition, the second of
envy, the third of
vanity. There is a very likable and decent family whose slightest faults are being excessively
addicted to the
bottle and
gaming. Young
Alice Johnson is permanently red in the face and arguing
drunkenly with her friend
Lady Williams, who is a paragon of every sort of virtue and
good sense: actually much prefiguring
Lady Russell from
Persuasion. Except that at the end of the entertainment, "the bottle being pretty briskly pushed about", the whole party are carried home,
Dead Drunk.
In Chapter the First we meet the party, and they have a masked ball, at which Charles Adams is obliged to stand half a mile away from the others because of the brightness of his beauty. In Chapter the Second Alice confesses her love for Charles to Lady Williams, who in Chapter the Third describes her own youth, and how she would have attained perfection because of her dear governess had she not been tragically taken from her.
'Miss Dickins was an excellent governess. She instructed me in the paths of virtue; under her tuition I daily became more amiable, and might perhaps by this time have nearly attained perfection, had not my worthy preceptoress been torn from my arms ere I had attained my seventeenth year. I never shall forget her last words. "My dear Kitty," she said, "Good night t'ye." I never saw her afterwards,' continued Lady Williams, wiping her eyes. 'She eloped with the butler the same night.'
In Chapter the Fourth the walk from her ladyship's
pigsty to one of Charles Adams's
horseponds, the two arguing constantly about Alice's red
complexion, until they meet a distressed and injured young lady, who in Chapter the Fifth tells her own story, how she fell in love with Charles on his estate in
Wales, and has since
stalked him and pursued him here seeking to marry him, but has been caught in one of the
mantraps he puts around his grounds to discourage the hordes of women who would seek his
perfection. In Chapter the Sixth they become firm friends with this
Lucy and Alice once more partakes very freely of Lady Williams's excellent
claret.
In Chapter the Seventh we hear about the hero of the novel, never mentioned by name, and not mentioned before: Alice's brother, who drops dead from excessive drinking and leaves her a large fortune. She seeks the hand of that perfect paragon Charles Adams, who refuses her in a manner that caricatures what Jane Austen would later use as the haughty and self-loving character of Mr Darcy.
In Chapter the Eighth the envious sister several times attempts to cut Lucy's throat while they are at Bath, and in Chapter the Ninth Lucy perishes by poison, the envious sister is hanged, the ambitious sister becomes the chief sultana to the grand mogul, and Lady Williams and Charles Adams are happily united.
There is an e-text available at http://home.earthlink.net/~lfdean/austen