Lady Susan

Rating: ★★★★

Method of Reading: Kindle, 80 pages in paperback
Dates of Reading: December 13, 2010-December 15, 2010
Author: Jane Austen
Publication Year: Never published by Austen: published post-mortem 1871.
Recommended To: Austenites.
Quotes:
   "Sister,—I congratulate you and Mr. Vernon on being about to receive into your family the most accomplished coquette in England."
Movie: No, but one is allegedly in the writing phase at the BBC.

Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Susan
Link: http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/ladysusan.html

My View: Irresistible, like any Austen. The author simply has no peer, and her writing and character-driven stories were so far ahead of her time, and so cutting in any time period, that no girl then and no girl now could possibly put down an Austen. The extremely unladylike Lady of this work, written, most likely, for the Austen family's enjoyment, has a light feel due to the epistolary form, but has some really good content. I would have liked to have seen maybe a little more of Fredericka's POV.
   And now I will treat you to an extra note from my never-ending list of comments on the letters of Jane Austen. I've done projects about the thousands of letters Austen personally wrote in her lifetime, and the ones she uses as important plot devices in her books. But the fact that this book is one of her earliest pieces and that it is written in letter form makes me think that this novel was a developmental exercise for Jane in character creation.... In my mind, her later works are marked by amazing, 3D characters, and she had to have practiced somewhere. My guess is that in this "practice piece," (never published, because who wants their scratch work given to the public? No one. Except JKR.) she used epistolary form because it lends itself to the first person and forces/allows a writer to really get into a character's head. Later, she uses letters for the most important and intimate moments in characters' stories, handing the pen to her characters when she needs to be sure of accuracy in the portrayal of their thoughts (examples include the letters of Pride and Prejudice or Emma). All of her later character-driven works carry this trend. Is it possible that she learned this technique so early in her work, forming a habit of displaying the most important character moments from the characters' personal viewpoints? I guess we'll never know.... One thing is for sure, I enjoyed this form much more than I anticipated, and even though the short length of the novel (again, supportive of the theory that this was a practice exercise just to hone her epistolary form) was appropriate. Shows Austen diversity, as this plot and these characters fit none of her other works.


Always,
Your Bibliomaniac

Bibliographic info:
Austen, Jane. Lady Susan. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Electronic.