Discussion of Jane Austen's Love and Freindship [sic]

"Beware my Laura . . . Beware of the insipid Vanities and idle Dissipations of the Metropolis of England; Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath and of the stinking fish of Southampton."

Join us on Monday, April 6th for a discussion of Jane Austen's anarchic teenage satire.

About "Love and Freindship" (yes, that's how she spelled it)
Completed in 1790, when Jane Austen was 14, Love and Freindship is among the most accomplished of the manuscript works that make up Austen's juvenilia. This raucously funny epistolary novella, with its bombastic action and unreliable narrator, satirizes "sensibility" as a cultural value — a subject that Jane Austen would turn to again and again throughout her career. This text is in the public domain and can be accessed for free here.

Meet Your Facilitator
Sarah Rose Kearns is a playwright, performer, and lifelong Austen enthusiast. Her stage adaptation of Persuasion debuted off-Broadway in 2021 and, last year, received its second production at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in Baltimore. Her one-act play Manydown, which imagines one important night in the lives of Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra, has been performed more than a dozen times in six US states, as well as in the UK and New Zealand — and was recently adapted as a short film by Prerna Ramachandra. Rose's third and latest play The Austens, a full-length dramatic comedy about the beloved novelist and her family, has had staged readings in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and at Jane Austen’s brother’s house in Chawton, the English village where the play is set. In addition to her creative work, Rose is passionate about the work of building strong communities through art. Since its inception in 2020, she has served as a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) committee for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; and, since 2023, as co-Regional Coordinator for the JASNA New York Metropolitan Region. She is also the founding artistic director of The Holy Theatre, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit arts organization in New York City, with a mission to make plays and other gatherings that leave people feeling nourished, connected, and more able to be brave.