Like most Jane Austen fans, I focused my Austen attention on her six fully completed books. I really thought I had my Austen down, but then I thought I better look at some of her earlier writing and OMG HAVE YOU READ LADY SUSAN?

This is a book that Austen sort of kind of finished – I mean, it looks kind of done but it reads like she planned to do some major edits and also maybe make it more than eighty pages long. She never attempted to have it published, and therefore it is often overlooked.

But OMG those eighty pages! It’s like cake infused with acid and then more cake. It’s THE BEST in the sense of being subversive, wicked fun, albeit not the most polished. I realize that Austen is doing just fine as a literary figure without my reviews – but if, like me, you missed Lady Susan, allow me to urge you to check it out.

Austen began writing by writing poems and plays and stories that entertained her family – and she could be pretty dirty and slapstick. Lady Susan was her first full novel (although by modern standards it’s a novella). It’s written in epistolary form (that is, as a series of letters). Austen’s first draft of Sense and Sensibility was called Elinor and Marianne, and it was also an epistolary novel. While I don’t know why Austen changed the form of Sense and Sensibility, I do know that the epistolary form in Lady Susan has pros (hearing Lady Susan talk is endlessly entertaining) and cons (the form is, by it’s nature, limiting, and Austen’s other voices don’t come through distinctly).

One reason to read Lady Susan is to see how an author like Austen can improve her craft over time. Look at the voices in Pride and Prejudice. A letter by, say, Mrs. Bennett would not seem remotely like a letter from Charlotte Lucas. You would immediately be able to tell which character wrote which letter without so much as a glance at the signature. Alas, with the exception of Lady Susan and her friend, Mrs. Johnson, everyone in Lady Susan sounds pretty much the same – nice and boring. Luckily, we get enough of Lady Susan that the book as a whole is not boring in the least.

The plot goes like this: Lady Susan is a middle-aged but still smokin’ hot widow, or as another character puts it, she is, “…really excessively pretty.” She likes money and she likes sex, preferably with younger men. At the moment, she has enough money that she can concentrate on sex, but she still has to keep the long game in mind. She wishes to avoid the trap of her friend Mrs. Johnson, who married a man “just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the gout – too old to be agreeable, and too young to die.” What Lady Susan really wants to marry her daughter Frederica off to a rich guy so that Lady Susan can remain rich and single – but Frederica is not cooperative in the least.

Letters fly back and forth as Lady Susan engages in flirtation, manipulation, damage control, and child abuse with a complete and utter lack of conscience (Frederica is a teenager in the novel). If the Disney villainesses ever got together for tea, Lady Susan would invite herself to the party, convince everyone that it was actually their idea for her to come, announce that she has slept with all of the princes and that they really aren’t that great, and explain to the step-mothers of Cinderella and Snow White that it is IDEAL for their step-daughters to marry the prince, as long as there is a nice solid pre-nup that specifies that step-moms get a bottomless allowance, their own castle (several, in fact – one must neglect either London nor the country), and use of a coach and horses. At the end of the tea she will make off with the tea set, Cruella DeVille’s coat, and Maleficent’s lipstick, and she will still manage to be invited back for dinner.

Seriously, tell me these don’t sound like Disney Villainess lines:

Where there is a disposition to dislike, a motive will never be wanting.

There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person predetermined to dislike acknowledge one’s superiority.

I have made him sensible of my power, and can now enjoy the pleasure of triumphing over a mind prepared to dislike me, and prejudiced against all my past actions.

Frederica shall be Sir James’s wife before she quits my house, and she may whimper, and the Vernons may storm, I regard them not. I am tired of submitting my will to the caprices of others; of resigning my own judgment in deference to those to whom I owe no duty, and for whom I feel no respect.

 

At any minute I expected her to turn into a dragon, or burst into song, or both.

The book ends pretty abruptly and it has enough of a comeuppance for Lady Susan that you feel a certain sense of just desserts but not such a comeuppance that you feel depressed (Lady Susan is selfish, greedy, and completely lacking in any sense of empathy or responsibility or one single decent human emotion and yet I am Team Lady Susan FTW). One gets the feeling that Lady Susan will be just fine. It’s not a gothic thing where she throws herself off a cliff or dies of a wasting disease. It’s a very pragmatic ending, which foreshadows the pragmatic endings of characters like Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility, who gets money but not love, but seems fine with it, and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, who gets lust but not much money and at least seems fine for now.

It’s easy to tell that this is an early draft, and not something Austen would have sent to a publisher (she never tried to have it published). As I said, the ending feels like Austen got bored and decided to wrap everything up so she could go to tea. The supporting characters are terribly bland. Lady Susan and her friend are All Bad and everyone else is All Good and the good people are all alike. I’ve always thought of Austen as having a strong streak of cynicism but the ending in Lady Susan is very cynical indeed. The book isn’t as well-crafted or layered or rich as some of Austen’s other works – but it sure is fun to see Lady Susan, and Jane Austen, wreak havoc.

Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published Lady Susan in 1871 as part of his Memoir of Jane Austen. Today you can buy a print or digital copy or find it free online. There are hot rumors that soon we’ll get a movie version of Lady Susan, called Love and Friendship, starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny. Let us hope that this draws more attention to Austen’s most wicked and gleeful novel.