The novel opens with her needing to leave Langford, where she’d been staying with the Manwarings, because she was having an affair with the married man of the house, and had seduced his sister’s suitor, Sir James Martin. Lady Susan is a beautiful, 35-year-old widow of four months, who is already on the prowl for a new, wealthy husband. “the most accomplished coquette in England” (Reginald of Lady Susan) One reason might have been its subject matter. While this latter one she rewrote in her well-known third person omniscient voice, retitling it Sense and sensibility, for some reason she didn’t go back to Lady Susan. It is epistolary in form, something she tried again with Elinor and Marianne. It was written, we believe, in 1793/4 when Austen would have been 18-19 years old, but was not published until 1871, well after her death, when her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh included it in his memoir of her. It is a complete novella that sits between her Juvenilia and her adult novels. If you’re not an Austen fan, you may not have heard of Lady Susan. As far as I’m concerned all bets are off my usual “rules” when it comes to Jane Austen. The reason is simple – my local Jane Austen group decided to schedule it for our October meeting. And I have a second confession to make: this is a rereading, but my reason for rereading has little to do with the reasons I gave in my recent post on Flanagan. Chapman’s The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, I bought the Penguin edition for my Kindle because it had an introduction by Margaret Drabble. And so, although I already had a copy of Lady Susan, in the Minor works volume of R.W. There are many reasons for this behaviour, but one of them is our interest in different introductions.

It is a truth universally acknowledged – I know this is a tired old joke but I seem programmed to do it – that Jane Austen fans will collect multiple editions of her works.

Book lady susan