Title: Lady Susan

Author: Jane Austen

First published: 1871 (probably written 1793-4)

Page count: 84

First line: My dear brother, I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation when we last parted, of spending some weeks with you at Churchill, and, therefore, if quiet convenient to you and Mrs. Vernon to receive me at present, I shall hope within a few days to be introduced to a sister whom I have so long desired to be acquainted with.

I’m having trouble getting over the fact that Jane Austen wrote this when she was less than 20 years old. Perhaps most people know how precocious she was, throwing out literary sparks from early in her teens. I didn’t. Austen is someone I know only through the books. The books I’ve read, I read close to, leaning over them with my hands held like blinkers about my face, the better to work on the sharpness of the writing – not that’s truly done on a two inch piece of ivory; that’s self-deprecation – but that it operates in a narrow band of the spectrum, irony only a slippered step and a slide from sincerity, and both an essential part of the dance. Is it because I’m scared? Or dismissive? Or is it truly that here, if not necessarily elsewhere, I am able to honour the author only by effacing them, and treating the text as autonomous, self-generated?

Lady Susan is an early work, then, and an uncharacteristic one in some ways – the titular protagonist is a more outrageous immoralist than Austen created elsewhere, closer to a character from The Dangerous Liaisons, which book she had probably heard about but not read, according to Claire Tomalin’s biography. Lady Susan, a still reasonably young widow, is a spirited and manipulative flirt, “the most accomplished coquette in England”. “She is really excessively pretty,” according to her rightly suspicious sister-in-law, Mrs Vernon:

However you may choose to question the allurements of a lady no longer young, I must, for my own part, declare that I have seldom seen so lovely a woman as Lady Susan. She is delicately fair, with fine grey eyes and dark eyelashes; and from her appearance one would not support her more than five and twenty, though she must in fact be ten years older.

Susan arrives at the Vernons’ house, trailing rumours of broken engagements and infatuated married men at the last house where she stayed (despite the self-serving lies in that first line of the first letter in the book, at top). She may not have much money, so needs to rely on the kindness of family and friends, and then get herself profitably remarried as soon as is feasible. The plot revolves around her attempt to snag Mrs Vernon’s brother, and to marry off her sixteen-year-old daughter, Frederica, who turns up on the scene after running away from the boarding school where she’s been cruelly dumped.

It’s one of the delightful twists of the book, making full use of the partial and evasive nature of the letter form, that we only discover late on in the short book that Frederica isn’t ‘perverse’, ‘dull and proud’ and ‘tiresome’, as Susan paints her, and everyone believes her to be, but actually rather intelligent and sweet-natured. (She’s a bookreader!) Still, the reader is torn between sympathising with the poor girl’s plight (what a mother!) and sheer delight in Lady Susan’s awfulness (what a mother!).

She really is a wonderful character. You don’t love to hate her. You don’t despise her. You don’t fear her. You simply enjoy her – which is perhaps the flaw of the book. It is so airy a confection that nothing, really, is ‘at stake’, as it is in Laclos’ far more malicious and tragic novel. It’s written on the harpsichord, rather than the piano, lovely, occasionally virtuosic, but brittle, with no shade to temper its bright light.

Certainly, Austen the master ironist is here, and Austen the social entomologist; Austen the elegant plotter, too – in nascent form, at least. All that’s missing is the Austen the novelist.

This isn’t a novel, and the manner in which it isn’t is instructive, in terms of this project. First of all, it’s epistolary, but that shouldn’t stop it being a novel. What it’s lacking is the sense of scene-making and scene-building. The half dozen or so characters who write the 40 letters that make up the book are in the business of relating to each other what has just happened to themselves and the people in their circle, what they feel about it, and what they think will happen next, but they are not describing the scenes in which these events occur in any detail. This, as with other novellas I’ve read in this project, is tell, tell, tell – though of course the telling is of that particular performative, self-betraying form of telling that happens when an eighteenth century character picks up a pen. All the showing that is done is the showing of the letter writer’s self.

This, perhaps, is the mark of Austen’s immaturity. Already, she can invent great characters, and a plausible voice and attitude for them, and she can manipulate and manoeuvre them about each other in the interests of plot, but she can’t construct a world for them to inhabit; she can’t reconcile the demands of imagination and realism; she can’t keep their feet on the ground.

Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve just read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot for the first time, and for all its addictive elements the prose is often a bore to read: you want to know what happens; you’d rather just not have to read it to find out. Eugenides does fill out his scenes, in the grand old style, allowing himself only a few elegant postmodern pirouettes, rather than the constant jerky flourishes you might expect, given the premise of the novel, but the line-by-line joy of Austen is not there.

It’s instructive to learn that Sense and Sensibility was original written in epistolary form (as Elinor and Marianne). It’s instructive, too, to pick up and glance through Claire Tomalin’s book, but still I’m torn both ways. Austen is fascinating largely for the way she reflects light. We aren’t even entirely sure in what order the novels were written. Everything about her seems to gather itself into a gentle and admonitory nod back to the work, the prose.

Reading the main Austen novels, you have to keep altering your perspective: the prose is so delightful, and the intimate social and emotional dance of the characters so hypnotic, that you need to lean back to see the room they’re dancing in, follow and assimilate  the patterns their feet make, intuit the unheard melody that’s driving the shuffle and clop of their feet on polished wooden floors. No such difficulty with Lady Susan, which, although bright and brilliant and charming, exists entirely at a single focal length. It is an armful of confetti thrown in the air: that briefly beautiful.