Lady Susan Book

This is a very clever book indeed. Quite different from the rest of Austen's oeuvre, it is not the sort of book that you can imagine a teenager might be able to write. To conceive the character of a woman of 35ish and her use of sexual attraction and seduction for a 19 year old, as Jane was when she finished this, shows remarkable powers of observation and deduction. How much harder in the more sheltered world of the 18thC than the tell-all media-driven world of now?

Unlike all Austen's other books, this is in no way a comedy of manners, this is a single-minded depiction of the manipulative and rapacious Lady Susan.

Lady Susan is a beautiful and very charming widow whose greatest delight in life is to trump it over all other women, to lure their men, their husbands and suitors, no matter what age into her sphere. As a widow she needn't stop at flirtation and promises of future, married delight and she doesn't. The book talks of a married man staying the night with her. She is a scandal wherever she invites herself, but the men cannot resist her.

She has two main aims, one is to get her milk-and-water daughter whom she has no feelings for married to as wealthy a man as possible in as short a time as can be managed. Her other aim is to marry money herself.

This plot is quite secondary to the absolutely brilliant drawing-out of her character via letters. Jane's marvellous technique of an epistolary novel each letter detailing the writer's perception and judgement of Lady Susan is among the best writing of any of her novels. The moral issues she brings out are tailored to the character of the letter writer - some admire and encourage her, some do so falsely because she brings interest to their boring country lives and some thoroughly disapprove of her and try to protect the daughter who cannot stand up to her cold and dismissively cruel mother.

But where it is let down and probably why it wasn't submitted for publication until more than 50 years after Jane Austen's death is that the ending is abrupt and quite badly-written. It is as though Jane knew that she had to punish Lady Susan for her adultery but could not quite find the right device in which to bring it to that conclusion, so the end is a summary of what happens and is very, very disappointing.

This was, like most of Austen's books, a solid 5 star read, but for the ending. So 4 stars.