None of Jane Austen's early works were published in her lifetime. At some point, Austen copied 29 of them (including Love and Freindship, Lady Susan and The History of England) into three notebooks, which she called Volume the First, Volume the Second and Volume the Third. These three volumes are considered Austen's juvenilia, and by some critics her 'minor works.' Love and Freindship and The History of England are two of the six works in Volume the Second. Jane Austen's sister Cassandra drew 13 illustrations for the History after the copying was completed. Volume the Second passed to Cassandra at Austen's death in 1817, and on Cassandra's death in 1845 to their elder brother Francis Austen (a distinguished Royal Navy officer), with whose descendants it remained until it was sold to the British Library in 1977.
In 1922, Francis Austen's granddaughter permitted Chatto & Windus to publish Volume the Second under the title Love and Freindship. The History was included in volume 6 of R. W. Chapman's Oxford University Press edition of Jane Austen's complete works, and since then has been published in several new editions and imprints (including a German edition in 2009).
The Watsons was probably begun around 1803, and abandoned after the death of Austen's father in January 1805. Like the other early works, the manuscript was left to Cassandra Austen on Jane's death and subsequently passed on to other members of the family. It was published in 1871 by by the novelist's nephew, James Edward Austen–Leigh (1798–1874), in the revised and augmented edition of his Memoir of Jane Austen. The manuscript was divided up in 1915; the smaller part was acquired in 1925 by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and the remaining larger portion went through various hands until it was bought by the Bodleian Library (Oxford) in 2011.
The Lady Susan manuscript is also now owned by the Morgan Library, which notes that this epistolary novella was first published by James Edward Austen-Leigh in his 1871 Memoir (see above).
The 2016 film Love and Friendship was based on Lady Susan, borrowing only its title (with the spelling mistake corrected) from Love and Freindship. It was directed by Whit Stillman and starred Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan Vernon.
© Haydn Thompson 2022