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Who really said it

Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint

Written by Jane Austen 1775–1817 · English novelist · wrote this at fourteen, in 1790
Read in the 1790 text itself — though Austen spelled it “chuse”. Free to reuse

Genuine, early, and funnier in place than out of it. The line closes Love and Freindship — Austen’s own misspelling — a burlesque of sentimental novels she finished on 13 June 1790, aged fourteen, and dated in her own hand. It is not advice from Austen but the dying speech of a character: Sophia, expiring of a “galloping Consumption” caught by lying fainting on wet grass, warns her friend Laura off swooning and recommends madness instead. Austen wrote chuse; the modern version tidies the spelling and softens her dash into a comma.

Last verified 13 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint” Jane Austen, Love and Freindship, Letter the 14th, manuscript dated 13 June 1790, when she was fourteen; first published 1922. It is spoken by the character Sophia on her deathbed, in a burlesque of sentimental novels — she is dying of a chill caught while fainting, so the advice is a joke. Modern versions spell it "choose". Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”

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In context

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Provenance

Sophia's dying advice

Work
Love and Freindship [sic] — an epistolary burlesque in Austen's notebook Volume the Second
Location
Letter the 14th, Laura in continuation — the last words of the character Sophia
Written
Dated by Austen at the end of the manuscript: "June 13th 1790" — she was fourteen
First published
1922, from the original manuscript, with a preface by G. K. Chesterton

“My beloved Laura (said she to me a few Hours before she died) take warning from my unhappy End and avoid the imprudent conduct which had occasioned it... Beware of fainting-fits... Though at the time they may be refreshing and agreable yet beleive me they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your Constitution... My fate will teach you this.. I die a Martyr to my greif for the loss of Augustus.. One fatal swoon has cost me my Life.. Beware of swoons Dear Laura.... A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequences—Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—” Letter the 14th — Sophia's last words

Austen’s spelling and punctuation exactly as printed, misspellings and all (agreable, beleive, greif) — she was fourteen. Read in the 1922 first edition ↗ and confirmed against the Project Gutenberg text ↗.

First edition, 1922
Love and Freindship, printed from the original manuscript
Love and Freindship — full text (Project Gutenberg)

How we verified this

  • The first edition. The sentence appears in the scanned 1922 Frederick A. Stokes edition, whose title page states that the work is “NOW FIRST PVBLISHED FROM THE ORIGINAL MS.” — see the scan ↗. That page also names the preface writer: G. K. Chesterton.
  • Independently, in a second text. The same passage, with the same spelling, is in Project Gutenberg’s Love and Freindship ↗, under “LETTER the 14th”. Two independent transcriptions agreeing on “chuse” is what rules out a modernised edition being the source of the wording.
  • The date, in Austen's own hand. The manuscript of Love and Freindship ends “Finis” followed by “June 13th 1790”. Austen was born in December 1775, so she completed it at fourteen.
  • Who is speaking. The line is not narration and not Austen’s own counsel: it is inside quotation marks in Laura’s letter, reporting what Sophia said “a few Hours before she died”. The surrounding paragraph explains the joke — Sophia’s illness was caused by the very fainting she is warning against.
Public domain

Public domain in the United States. Jane Austen died in 1817, and this text was first published in 1922 ↗ — comfortably before the 1931 cut-off, so no publication copyright subsists. It is an English original, so no translator’s rights arise either. Project Gutenberg distributes the complete work freely on the same basis.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What gets lost when it is quoted alone

The author is right and the words are nearly right. What goes missing is that this is a punchline in a parody, delivered by a dying woman whose own advice killed her — and that Austen’s spelling was not ours.

“as often as you choose, but do not faint” Truncated

Austen wrote “Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”. The circulating version modernises chuse, replaces the semicolon with a comma, and drops the trailing dash — which in the manuscript is where Sophia stops speaking and dies. Both the 1922 first edition ↗ and Project Gutenberg print the older form.

Sophia, not Austen Speaker, not author

Austen wrote the sentence, but she gave it to a character to say, and the character is a target. Sophia is a walking satire of the sentimental heroine; her deathbed distinction between fainting (fatal) and running mad (healthy exercise) is meant to be absurd. Quoted as a standalone motto it reads as brisk encouragement, which is close to the opposite of the joke.

The cause of Sophia's death context stripped

Two paragraphs earlier Laura explains that Sophia’s fatal illness — “a galloping Consumption” — came from lying unconscious on wet ground in the night dew, while Laura, who had been running mad instead, stayed warm and survived. The advice is empirical. That is the entire gag, and it does not travel with the line.

Jane Austen really did write it, at fourteen, in 1790 — but she wrote chuse, and she wrote it as a joke — read Letter the 14th in full ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

By 1790 the sentimental novel had trained a generation of readers to expect heroines who fainted at bad news, loved at first sight and treated strong feeling as proof of virtue. Love and Freindship takes every one of those conventions literally and follows it to the end of its own logic: Austen’s heroines faint so relentlessly that one of them catches her death doing it.

The joke needs the reader to know the rules it is breaking, which is why it survives better as a line than as a book. But it is also the earliest clear sight of what Austen would spend her career doing — taking a fashionable sentiment seriously enough to test it, and letting it collapse.

Sophia dies of fainting. Her last act is to recommend madness instead — on the evidence.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Humility Character Courage

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Love and Freindship, first edition (Frederick A. Stokes, 1922)archive.org

The primary artifact: the first printing from Austen's manuscript, with a preface by G. K. Chesterton and a half-size reproduction of a manuscript page. Its title page — "NOW FIRST PVBLISHED FROM THE ORIGINAL MS." — is what dates the work's entry into print.
Love and Freindship — searchable full text of the 1922 editionarchive.org

The plain-text layer of that scan, where the sentence reads "Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—". Useful for checking the original spelling against any modernised edition.
Love and Freindship [sic] and Other Early Worksgutenberg.org

A second independent transcription, free to read in full. Letter the 14th carries Sophia's death scene; the manuscript's closing date, "June 13th 1790", is at the end of the text.
Wikiquote: Jane Austenen.wikiquote.org

Quotations arranged by work, including a Love and Friendship (1790) section — which carries Laura's companion line, "Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground—I screamed and instantly ran mad!", the running joke this sentence pays off.

The author

About Jane Austen

Jane Austen

1775–1817 · English novelist · this is her earliest surviving comic masterpiece, written at fourteen

Jane Austen was born at Steventon, Hampshire, in December 1775 and died at Winchester in 1817. Before the six novels she is known for, she filled three notebooks with parodies and unfinished stories written in her teens. Love and Freindship — she misspelled it, and editors have preserved the error ever since — was finished on 13 June 1790, when she was fourteen, and is a sustained demolition of the sentimental novel: heroines faint at every crisis, fall in love on sight, and rob their relations on principle. None of it was written for publication. It stayed in manuscript for 132 years and reached print only in 1922, which is why a line this quotable spent a century unavailable to quote.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Jane Austen, “Love and Freindship,” Letter the 14th, in Love & Freindship and Other Early Works: Now First Published from the Original MS., preface by G. K. Chesterton (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1922) — “Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”. Manuscript dated by the author “June 13th 1790”. Scan at archive.org ↗; full text also at Project Gutenberg ↗.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint’?” Last verified 13 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/run-mad-as-often-as-you-choose-but-do-not-faint/

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