Jane Austen. Lady Susan. 1794?; Amazon Digital Service, 16 May 2012. Ebook.
According to the fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, Lady Susan was written by Jane Austen when she was about eighteen years old and not published until 1871, long after she had died in 1817. The short novel is really very well done—its only weakness is the manner in which its conclusion was written. I will explain. Otherwise, it is fun to read and well under a hundred pages in printed form.
Lady Susan Vernon is quite different from any of Jane Austen’s heroines. She is really more like Vanity Fair‘s Becky Sharp. Lady Susan is calculating, manipulative, selfish, and probably more intelligent than any of the upper class people she associates with.
Widowed, she is carrying on an adulterous affair but manages to deftly cover things up. She is able to persuade nearly anyone who listens that she has been unfairly accused.
Similar to some other upper class women of any era, her daughter is an annoyance and a burden, but in the course of the story, we find out that Frederica is not only older than Lady Susan would like to admit but really quite sweet. The one thing about this story that is like the older Jane Austen is that Frederica does end up marrying the nice young man she deserves. Still, Lady Susan continues to get away with her behavior. She is no fool.
The story is told in epistolary form, that is, through a series of letters. In them we see how the siblings and in-laws of the late Lord Vernon do not really trust Lady Susan. We see how Reginald de Soucy becomes smitten and then repelled by Lady Susan. And we see how Lady Susan reveals herself in the letters back and forth between her and her best friend Alicia Johnson.
The weakness which I alluded to earlier is that the conclusion to the novel is a mere wrap-up. No more letters. It is an epilogue which includes the climax. It is as if young Miss Austen simply lost interest or energy; or, more likely, the people she had been entertaining were about to depart. Either way, she summarizes the ending. Because of that, Lady Susan is not the developed work that Emma or Pride and Prejudice are, but Lady Susan (the lady, not the story) is quite a character!
I read this after having seen the recent film Love and Friendship which is based on Lady Susan. (Austen did write another early short piece she called Love and Freindship [sic], but that is a different story.)
The film is very well done. It was perhaps superior in one important aspect other than fleshing out the ending better. Since the Lady Susan book is a collection of letters, there is a minimum amount of dialogue. However, the dialogue in the film is quite clever and captures the personalities of the book’s main characters quite well.
One slight difference is that in Lady Susan the Johnsons are English, and Mrs. Alicia Johnson worries that her husband wants to move back to the country away from the London social scene. In the film, the Johnsons are American Tories who left Connecticut after the Revolution, and Mrs. Johnson is afraid that her husband’s work will take him back to America. There are a couple of lines about the horrors of Connecticut which got a lot of laughs in the theater where I saw it—in Connecticut!