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2nd reading Feb 10, 2019—As is often the case, I preferred my first reading, when I found this novella comical, Lady Susan's hypocrisy delightful in its wickedness in a world and time when women were so constrained by good manners and social conventions, and widows were considered especially louche as unmaidenly women who were possibly out to steal one's husband (as Lady Susan certainly is). But this time I mostly saw the pathos of the situation, what hopeless tangled webs Lady S weaves and ends up being caught in. Sure enough, she ends up married to a proper fortune in the end, but to a man who was barely good enough for her daughter, a daughter she despises and thinks stupid, when she herself is a woman of some intelligence and wit. I'm saddened at the few options women had in a patriarchal society that was so extremely codified and in which being a two-faced hypocrite was one of the few ways a woman could express some form of individuality, liberty and spirit. I'm further saddened that even today, as I've just now read in the New York Times, a princess in Dubai can be under house arrest, treated as mentally insane, her every movement watched by her powerful father because she has the temerity to want to make a life for herself. How little things have changed since the 18th century. What does one have to do with the other? I'm not quite sure. The evils of the Patriarchy I suppose. One woman seeking wealth, the other seeking liberty, but somehow their fates being tied to men in both cases. I'll preserve my original rating, since I decided long ago that first impressions are the ones that most count when it comes to appreciating a book.

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Originally review from February 2014�Lady Susan is a short epistolary novel, assumed to be written around 1794, but which was only actually published in 1871. We quickly learn that the heroine, Lady Susan, though reputedly very beautiful, is also a wicked and perverse woman. Recently widowed, she has always been a terrible flirt and sows discord between a man and his wife when she encourages the man to make advances to her. She tells what must be close to her true thoughts to her particular friend Mrs Johnson, while with everyone else she puts on a show of virtue and motherly love. But we know she's sent her own daughter to a private London school for girls knowing perfectly well that it offers intolerable living conditions, her sole object being to wear the girl down and force her to surmount her distaste for a man she abhors and marry him because he is of Lady Susan’s choosing. This wickedly fun story reminded me in some ways of that other famous epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, not least of all because Lady Susan could certainly compete with the Marquise de Merteuil for undiluted hypocrisy and depravity. It's a short work, just 2.5 hours in audio format, this Naxos version being narrated by a fantastic cast of actors. Delightful. And now I think of it, I think I’d enjoy revisiting this little gem five years later.