northanger abbey lady susan the watsons sanditon

I have been called an unkind mother, but it was the sacred impulse of maternal affection, it was the advantage of my daughter that led me on and if that daughter were not the greatest simpleton on earth, I might have been rewarded for my exertions as I ought. Having become accustomed to the innate goodness of Jane’s heroines, I had to read the following passage twice before I fully understood that Lady Susan was made of different stuff than Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Elliot: If you have not read Lady Susan before, be prepared to encounter an anti-Jane heroine a beautiful, manipulative, calculating, and self-indulgent widow a woman so cold-hearted in her machinations that she puts her own interests ahead of her daughter’s, or anyone else’s for that matter. Also, it is a superb example of the novel composed entirely of letters, and one can never have too many of those in a collection. Why did I choose Jane Austen’s less famous and somewhat atypical Lady Susan rather than an excerpt from Sense and Sensiblility, Emma, or Pride and Prejudice? Because as much as possible I wanted to use complete works rather than fragments, and because this little jewel is unbelievably vicious.

While Jane recopied the book she did not revise it it was evidently never meant for publication.Īuthor Joe Queenan included Lady Susan in his 2004 volume, The Malcontents: The Best Bitter, Cynical, and Satirical Writing in the World, Explaining why he chose this short work for his book, he writes: This book was written around 1793-1794 (there are several date estimates) but it was not published until 1871 in Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen, almost a half century after Jane Austen’s death. So much has been written about Northanger Abbey by experts whose knowledge of that excellent work eclipse mine, that I will concentrate on one of Jane’s more fascinating but lesser known earlier works, Lady Susan. Johnson, but included in a previous edition) and a wealth of resources in the form of explanatory notes, source bibliography, and appendix. As with Pride and Prejudice, this new publication comes with an introduction (excellently written by Claudia L. The reissue of the Oxford World’s Classic Northanger Abbeyincludes Jane Austen’s lesser known works: Lady Susan, The Watsons (a fragment), and Sanditon (Jane’s unfinished last work).

Northanger abbey lady susan the watsons sanditon