Lady Susan
by Jane Austen
Penguin Little Clothbound Classics 2023

One of the characters in Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, The Watsons, remarks to her sister that she “cannot help feeling for those that are crossed in love.” There is no risk to anybody being “crossed in love” in Lady Susan, another of Austen’s posthumously published novels. This work of juvenilia, written around 1795, when Austen was 20, is a short epistolary narrative filled with characters who are unashamedly insincere and who receive little sympathy from their young creator’s scathing satire.

Lady Susan is often lumped into an omnibus containing another two of Austen’s posthumously published works: the above-mentioned The Watsons and Sanditon, the novel she was working on when she died at 42. This trio forms an odd mix, because the two latter books, though both incomplete, display the work of Austen at the peak of her craft; Lady Susan is jarringly amateurish when placed alongside Sanditon and The Watsons. Perhaps it is this incompatibility that prompted the editors of the Penguin Little Clothbound Classics to issue Lady Susan as a standalone work. This elegant volume with its sturdy binding and stately maroon endpapers must therefore be judged on individual merit alone. Is this what Virginia Woolf meant when she talked of picking over the bones and scraps of the Western canon?

Austen’s juvenilia in general has been described as “fairly insubstantial.” Lady Susan is no exception. The eponymous heroine of the book is a recently-widowed mother of one who spends her newly-acquired independence flitting from one “contemptibly weak” relation to another and from one country house to another, flirting and cajoling and generally causing chaos wherever she goes, leading to her being tarred (behind her back) with the epithet of “most accomplished coquette in England.” In fact, almost all the characters are continuously whinging about each other in letters to one another: “Silly Woman! what does she expect by such manoeuvres?” While there are signs here of how the mature Austen will employ the irony and paradox of a patriarchal world manipulated by women (“you may easily pacify him,” advises Lady Susan’s vindictive confidant, Mrs Johnson, referring to one of several genteel airheads the merciless heroine strings along to amuse herself), the endless and unsubtle shallowness of the one-dimensional cast quickly wears thin.

The Watsons is often cited as the unfinished work whose elements were fed into later novels such as Emma (see for instance the preface to the William Collins Sanditon & Other Stories omnibus). Yet Lady Susan should not be overlooked as an early attempt at an Emma-like heroine. Just as Emma speculates on “how useful she might find” Harriet in “forming all these schemes,” so too does Lady Susan plot her solipsistic manipulations: Mr Vernon has been “very useful” in her “design” to “prevent [her] brother-in-law’s marrying.” The difference between the heroines concerns depth: Emma is a complex character who learns and grows throughout the narrative, while Lady Susan remains a cartoonishly heartless villain until the end.

The epistolary device in Lady Susan provides another early intimation of the mature Austin’s signature brilliance. If Lady Susan is the genesis of Austen’s fictional letters, in which all the characters, “absolutely on the catch for a husband,” sound the same (catty, calculating, supercilious), then Persuasion contains the letter’s fitting apogee. Consider the latter’s narrative tension, ratcheted up until near the end of the novel and then exploding in the scribbled and feverish desperation of Wentworth’s extemporized letter to Anne: “A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening or never.”

Louise Glück’s poem “Nostos” contends that “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” Austen was a precocious talent who held her quill and paper at the ready to capture in writing as much of that vivid early glimpse of life as possible. And even though an early work like Lady Susan lacks finesse, it is nonetheless interesting insofar as it offers the reader a peek into Austen’s inchoate genius. Yet ultimately, as a standalone work of fiction, Lady Susan does not offer us enough of what GK Chesterton called Austen’s “exuberant interest in the ordinary.” It does not engender within us the iridescent web of interpersonal love and strife of her mature work. We must therefore concede that this slim book, pretty as the Penguin Little Clothbound edition is, might be better appreciated, after all, in a collected volume of her shorter works. Instead of an uneven mix of juvenile and mature work, as alluded to above, what about the complete juvenilia paired with a selection of her letters and finished off with a thorough introduction and notes?

Bren Booth-Jones is an Amsterdam-based writer and editor. He is the winner of the 2019 White Label Competition and has two books published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. Bren’s poems and reviews have appeared in De Optimist, Dutch Design Week, Open Letters Review, and elsewhere. Find him on X: @BrendonBoothJo1