Word: laura
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...films in a Manhattan art house. Viewers who might otherwise catch Caveman will discover 17 fiction features and documentaries, including John Hanson and Rob Nilsson's painterly Northern Lights (Crosby) and Jan Egleson's vivid The Dark of the Street (Boston), featuring a curly-haired charmer named Laura Harrington. Good, bad or just different, regional cinema may be here to stay...
Love and Freindship is short (some 30 printed pages) and hilariously to the point. It consists of a series of letters from Laura to the daughter of a childhood "freind." Laura pours out the story of her unhappy past and makes herself ridiculous with nearly every vapid word she utters. She complains: "A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Freinds, my Acquaintance and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called...
Austen rapidly trots Laura through a standard romance plot. She marries a handsome stranger named Edward, moments after he appears at her parents' house. Edward is running away from his father, who wants him to marry a certain Lady Dorothea; he tells the adoring Laura how he refused: "Lady Dorothea is lovely and Engaging; I prefer no woman to her; but know Sir, that I scorn to marry her in compliance with your wishes. No! Never shall it be said that I obliged my Father." Edward and Laura set off to pamper their emotions and sponge off relatives...
Eavesdropping follows, as do miraculous reunions, grand larceny, imprisonment, overturned carriages and the untimely deaths of nearly everyone except Laura...
Austen exaggerates nothing; given her target she scarcely had to. But she brings to this item of juvenilia the mark of an accomplished satirist: she sets foolishness off against an implied moral world. Near the end of her narrative, Laura recalls meeting a plain girl named Bridget: "She could not be supposed to possess either exalted Ideas, Delicate Feelings or refined Sensibilities - She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil & obliging Young Woman ..." To her later glory, Jane Austen was to make a lasting place in English fiction for such plain creatures...