Book Review: Austen's Couples

Renard Press ISBN 978-1-80447-147-0 www.renardpress.com 

This is a collection of little stories which Jane Austen wrote when she was a girl, one presumes a teenager. Each story is just a few pages long and the whole book is only sixty pages long.

Sweet little stories from Jane Austen

The writing proves that Jane Austen had a quite bizarre sense of humour and she observed very closely the sort of silly things adults would say. You have only to read these little stories to see what a sense of the absurd she had.

So for example, we've got Frederick and Elfrida. Elfrida assumes she is to marry Frederick but he says:

“D*** me, Elfrida, you may be married tomorrow, but I won't!”

This answer distressed her too much for her delicate constitution. She accordingly fainted and was in such a hurry to have a succession of fainting fits that she had scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another.

The whole book is filled with funny lines such as:  

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…he had therefore the best part of the room to himself. Its size was not amounting to more than a third of a mile in length and half a one in breadth.

It seems that some of the eccentric teenage spellings have been corrected in this edition, but there are some they've left in. For example, she spells Dutchess with a ‘t’ which I find quite funny. I'd love to see what some of her other regular spelling mistakes were -- I think they would have been rather sweet to see.

I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend the book to any other than the most die-hard Jane Austen fans because it's very short and these stories are really rather silly but if you are an Austen fan then this pretty little gift edition will definitely be a nice addition to your bookshelf.