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Jane Austen's novel about a femme fatale, the lovely and devious Lady Susan.



This early epistolary Austen novel follows the young(ish), attractive and recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon as she schemes her way around England, leaving emotional wreckage in her wake. Lady Susan is a unique main character for Austen, two-faced, mean-spirited and amoral ... yet witty and intelligent.

Lady Susan is trying to marry off her young daughter Frederica, whom she despises as stupid and insipid - well, she is pretty insipid, actually - to Sir James, a rich young man, while maneuvering to marry someone even richer herself. When she's banished from a home she was visiting (for seducing the husband, Lord Mainwaring), lacking better options, Lady Susan invites herself and her daughter Frederica for an extended stay with her dead husband's brother and his wife. The wife, Catherine Vernon, is one of the few people that sees through Susan's façade.



Catherine's handsome young brother and the family heir, Reginald De Courcy, soon arrives for a stay as well. He's initially laughingly suspicious of Lady Susan, whose reputation has preceded her.



But Lady Susan, all sweetness and distressed loveliness, is gradually able to convince Reginald that she's been unfairly maligned. Meanwhile she's writing letters to her friend, Alicia, confiding all her devious plans.

The plot thickens when Susan's shy daughter Frederica, desperately trying to avoid being married off to the oblivious Sir James, starts to fall for Reginald and begs him to help her evade her mother's plans for her. Susan's got all she can do to juggle all her lies and schemes, keeping Reginald on the hook while also continuing her relationship with Lord Mainwaring, who's still hanging around her. Just keeping her options open!

Lady Susan isn't a particularly deep or layered story; it was early days yet for Jane Austen. Other than Lady Susan herself and her foe Catherine Vernon, the characters are pretty much one-dimensional. But it's a fun read with many witty lines and an intriguing and unusual main character, and it's interesting to see Austen developing her style and craft. Half the fun in this book is reading Susan's explanations to Alicia of how completely she's tricking everyone around her. Even when I was getting anxious for her latest victim, Reginald, to wake up and smell the coffee, I was getting a kick out of how gleefully deceitful and amoral Susan is.