Reading the Classics: Lady Susan, by Jane Austen, the novel everyone ignores
I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of Austen fans (the ones who tend to want to confine Jane Austen to a tiny box of preciousness, or who only value her as a romance writer, or who have only seen the films) seem oblivious to this tight, short, ninety-percent-finished epistolary novel. Or they pretend it doesn’t exist, because it is not very romantic. And likewise, earnest critics who want Austen firmly up on her morally sound pedestal pretend this cheerfully amoral novel doesn’t exist.
It’s very short, probably written when she was in her late teens or early twenties. I reread it every few years, imagining how much fun it must have been for the home theater-loving Austen family to read out loud. It has two drawbacks: the male characters are all pastiches from eighteenth century novels, and it wasn’t finished.
But it has two pluses: it is a battle of the Titans between the female characters, whose personalities come delightfully alive, especially Lady Susan, who is (as she is introduced right at the outset) a practiced coquette. And two: it wasn’t finished, which permitted Austen to end it with an early version of the deliciously witty narrative voice that stands out so brilliantly in her subsequent work.
In it we also see certain themes: presumably Lady Susan has the highest rank of any of the characters, for to be called “Lady Firstname” meant you were daughter of an earl or higher. And the higher ranks do not do well in any of Austen’s novels–a distinction from, for example, Georgette Heyer, who invented an alternate England in which birth will always tell.
We also see that what women thought matters. What women did mattered. Austen’s work is all female gaze.
It was never published in her lifetime. I can imagine that she thought it a fun experiment–worth reading aloud in the family circle to laugh over–but it didn’t have enough heft to turn into a novel as she did with the other two she wrote in the 1790s, the epistolary novels that became Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
Her “proper” heroine, Frederica, is as boring as she is trite, and ditto Reginald de Courcy, the hero. The subsidiary characters take over the story, especially Lady Susan and her cheerfully awful friend Mrs. Johnson, with some great comic cameo roles, like Sir James.
5 thoughts on “Reading the Classics: Lady Susan, by Jane Austen, the novel everyone ignores”
My junior year in college, I was still a pliable piece of mush who had yet to grown a spine, I read Lady Susan as part of a class on Austen. My proffessor panned it and therefore I turned my nose up to it. Now I wish I still had a copy. Have to go look it up and try again. She sounds so much more interesting than so many other Austen heroines.
If you have the Chapman edition of her collected works, it’s in there. There was also a HILARIOUS film made of it, called “Love and Friendship” (which is actually the title of one of her juveniles, friendship spelled freindship)
I was always disappointed that Austen did not polish Lady Susan for publication. I reread it every few years.
Me too! But I believe it was written strictly to entertain her family–as well as to hone her writing skills.
I was not familiar with this work and am very happy to have discovered it. I too wish that this work had been further developed and the fates of a number of characters revealed. As that is not to be, I am satisfying myself with creating numerous outcomes and perhaps even a sequel for the hapless Frederica and noble, yet weak, Reginald.