Jane Austen's Lady Susan and The Watsons: A Classic Tale of Love and Social Standing

A. Steven Toby: These two very different stories are minor works of a deservedly famous writer of romances. In the first one, Lady Susan, she uses the form of a series of letters without a narrative. This is certainly a challenging literary form, very likely inspired by the early French novel Liaisons Dangeureuses, which tells the whole story that way. It might be that even the famous author found this form challenging, for she required a last chapter of narrative to end it. I also found it slow moving and hard to keep myself interested.

The second story is much more like Miss Austen’s better known novels and the reader is led to regret that she didn’t finish it. The heroine, Emma, was raised by an aunt and uncle who were much better off than her parents, but the uncle died and the aunt remarried and sent her back to her parents. A peculiarity of the story is that Emma is described as having a “brown complexion” and that leads us Americans to think she might have black ancestors, a rarity in the England of that period but not impossible. Possibly even a top author felt she couldn’t integrate the race angle into the plot? possibly that’s not what she meant? I wonder what...

United States on Apr 01, 2021

Mr. Othniel Smith: Having downloaded this novella this a while ago, I was only compelled to read it after being intrigued by Whit Stillman's film adaptation, renamed "Love And Friendship" - I felt the need to have a few things clarified.

A very early Austen work which was not published until long after her death, it takes the form of a series of letters, and revolves around the antics of Lady Susan Vernon, a relatively young recent widow, who utilises her skills as a flirt to try and secure husbands for herself and her teenage daughter - as well as to have some fun. The story-telling is elegant and witty, although it seems a pity that the epistolary structure is abandoned at the very end.

Susan's amoral manipulativeness is cleverly drawn; and one is constantly reminded of how few options women had at the time in terms of attaining financial security. It would be too easy to see implied criticism of contemporaneous social attitudes, but Austen seems to be having fun with them.

It inevitably loses points for being less clear in its implications than Stillman was allowed to be over 200 years later (and, having experienced the two versions in quick succession, one has to applaud the...

United Kingdom on Jul 30, 2018

Phred: The epistolary novel is a very constraining and therefore challenge for the writer. In Jane Austin’s Lady Susan Ms Austen dishes the dirt from the inside as Lady Susan attempts to engage her daughter to a suitor who does not suit and plans a love affair with a married man and a separate advantageous marriage. The letters fly back and forth between her allies, enemies and the occasional more or less innocent third parties. There may be enough plot for a longer story but Ms Austen brings it to a swift end and nails it shut by abandoning the letter only format tying up her loose ends in a few pages of conventional narrative. The tone throughout is one more in line with British stage farce and being short remains fun with just a slight tendency to drag as the joke begins to wear.

In an attempt to give this satire some weight; It made me think of the 100 year older Dangerous Liaisons. The earlier book has a more convoluted plot and a more serious ending, but it is tainted with what reads to modern eyes as close to child abuse and worse. If you wish to indulge in pre-moderrn scandal and the humorous threat of misalliance, Ms Austin is the merrier read and a further benefit in...

United States on Jan 20, 2018

Francis James Franklin: The film, Love & Friendship, is a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, especially if we take the view that Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) succeeds in enchanting the viewers as well as those around her. Her intelligence and absolute determination to rule her own life make her a refreshing character for a period where women have so little power, and while her deceptions and seductions may put her in a bad light, these were the only tools available to her.

What is apparent in the book, but downplayed in the film, is her callous attitude towards her daughter. Where in the film it seems she has her daughter's best interests at heart, though managed in a ruthless and rather desperate way, in the book her motivation is entirely selfish. Indeed, Lady Susan in the book could even be read as psychopath: charming, manipulative, and devoid of a conscience.

The book is unfinished, ending with a Conclusion that sketches out further events. The film's end-scene echoes this but adds a definite note of triumph for Lady Susan.

United Kingdom on Apr 27, 2017

A.B. Gayle: To some, Lady Susan's actions and self delusion may seem over the top. There is nothing redeemable about her. The trouble is that people like her do exist. Read contributions on forums for Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders!
The trouble is that unless you are one of the unfortunate individuals in their firing line, these people ensure the rest of the world thinks they are marvellous.
Hats off to Jane Austen for identifying this type of behaviour at such a young age. And of understanding the personalities of the people surrounding them.
Her decision to write her story as a series of letters was both brilliant and doomed to failure.
The careful choosing of words and saying without saying worked really well at the start, but by midway through, the need for scenes with dialogue overrode a letter's capabilities.
Had she returned to this project later in life, she may have worked a way around it, interspersing action with letters. But perhaps that would have negated what she was trying to do. Write the whole thing in the form of letters.
She also possibly understood by then that characters like Lady Susan do exist, but they rarely become true heroes of a...

United States on Sep 08, 2016

Shelby Michaels: This little-known volume by Jane Austen, which is considered part of her Juvenilia, is really a gem.. It's a wonderful read. It's written in epistolary form. I thought I would be put off by reading a bunch of letters instead of a book that is centered directly in the action, but Jane Austen's use of the style is masterful. The book is a real page-turner! "Lady Susan" has been unfortunately overlooked by critics and perhaps therefore has escaped the notice of readers. Hopefully it will get the attention it deserves now that it has been adapted for the screen.

I saw the movie starring Kate Beckinsale, who did a great job as Lady Susan! Kate Beckinsale has performed in so many action movies that I had no idea she is such a serious actress. I was so struck by her performance that I purchased the DVD adaptation of Emma. She plays the part beautifully, a thousand times better than Gwyneth Paltrow did, imho. Now whenever I think of Emma, I think of her as Kate Beckinsale played her.

For some strange reason, they titled it"Love and Friendship" which is actually a separate work by Jane Austen.) I don't know why they weren't content with simply calling it "Lady Susan," since...

United States on Sep 03, 2016

Jezza: A fun, enjoyable piece of C18th chick-lit, with lots of nicely observed bitchiness; I'm not sure why this isn't part of the regular Jane Austen canon, because it's beautifully written. It took me about ten minutes to get used to the language. I particularly liked the way Austen manages to progress the story without any third person narrator. The epistolary novel may be very dated form, but it seems bang up to date, sharp and contemporary, here. I'm only sorry that she seems to have given up at the end, so that the denouement comes from the perspective of an omniscient third-party narrator. Actually, I'm also sorry that I couldn't work out what was going on with Lucy Manwairing at the end - I can tell that she is humiliated, but I'm not sure exactly how.

Which leads me to another observation - the characters in this seem like C18th versions of us, but they aren't. They are as foreign as women in ancient Athens or contemporary Saudi Arabia, an idle rich 'leisure class' who live off the labour of others and spend their lives managing the consolidation of property through marriages.

United Kingdom on Jun 07, 2016

Sämi: Auf ihrer Reise setzt Lady Susan ihre Tochter Frederica, die bisher was Bildung, Aufmerksamkeit und Zuwendung angeht vernachlässigt wurde, in einer Schule ab und trifft so allein bei der Familie ihres Schwagers ein. Bei den Vernons spielt Lady Susan die aufmerksame, liebevolle und stets verleumdete Schwägerin und Mrs Vernon muss ihrer Mutter gegenüber eingestehen, dass Lady Susan damit fast Erfolg hat. Sie ist trotz ihres Alters (35) immer noch attraktiv, sehr elegant, redegewandt und zeigt hervorragende Manieren. Allerdings gelingt es Mrs Vernon auch, hinter Lady Susans Fassade zu blicken und die wahre Gefühllosigkeit hinter dem perfekten Schauspiel zu erkennen, um so besorgter ist sie, als ihr Bruder Reginald de Courcy, der zu Besuch erscheint, sich von Lady Susan sehr angetan zeigt und viel Zeit mit ihr verbringt. Die Möglichkeit einer Verbindung zwischen diesen beiden Personen versetzt nicht nur sie selbst, sondern auch ihre Eltern in Alarm, die ebenfalls Lady Susans schlechten Ruf kennen sowie über Intrigen in Kenntnis gesetzt sind, mit denen diese damals die Ehe zwischen ihrer Tochter und Mr Charles Vernon zu verhindern suchte. Reginald hat für diese Besorgnisse...

Germany on Apr 24, 2016

Lena S.: I loved this! This shorter epistolary novel was so different from Jane Austen's other novels. And this is mainly because of her heroine: Lady Susan, who makes for an intriguing character.

Lady Susan Vernon is, for once, a character that is severely flawed, unlike other Austen heroines, who, of course not being perfect and having one or the other flaw to overcome, are overall quite well-behaved by the standards of their time, and are moral characters (or have developed more morals by the end of the novel).

Lady Susan on the other hand is doing the unspeakable - she’s a flirt and manhunter, plays with the affections of her admirers, manipulates them, and the only goal of her endeavours, after she is freshly widowed, is to secure a wealthy man for herself and her daughter (whom she doesn’t have much affection for). The daughter is the kind of heroine that, I think, you would usually find in an Austen novel, but here she is being tyrannised by her ambitious mother.

You can get through this novel very fast, it does not have many pages. It’s written in epistolary style - letters exchanged by characters, one of them of course Lady Susan. The reader gets an...

Germany on Feb 24, 2015