Lady Susan

Recently widowed and welcome nowhere for long, the beautiful, manipulative Lady Susan Vernon moves between the households of relatives and admirers, working simultaneously to marry off her reluctant daughter Frederica to a wealthy fool neither of them can stand and to secure a second husband, and perhaps a lover, for herself. Told entirely through the letters Lady Susan and the people around her exchange, the novel gives its most articulate, charming voice to its least trustworthy character, and lets the gap between what Lady Susan tells her confidante and what she tells everyone else do the real work of the story.

Jane Austen wrote Lady Susan around 1794, when she was about nineteen, but never prepared it for publication and its manuscript survived without her final polish. It appeared in print for the first time in 1871, in the expanded second edition of her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, more than fifty years after her death.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text, including Austen's own closing prose "Conclusion," in which she abandons the letter form to bring the story to its end.