#81 Jane Austen – Lady Susan

We’ve already had one quickfire Austen, and the new series starts off with another. The first were childhood squibs, written in her early teens. This one is something from a little later, written when Austen was about 18 or 19. And you can see more than a few touches of the author who is yet to come:

Of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a Man of his age! — just old enough to be formal, ungovernable, & to have the Gout; too old to be agreeable, too young to die.

Within another two years, Austen would have started on Pride and Prejudice, and in a further two Sense and Sensibility was published. If you’re an aspiring author over the age of 23, despair.

I’ve never really sat down and read my way through a writer’s developing work, especially their juvenilia. I pick up novels here and there, and while I might be able to tell an early Dickens from a late (the weight is usually the giveaway) I’ve never thought much about how authors hone their own talents. I suppose it’s easier for me to keep up a private myth that they spring, fully-formed, from the head of Minerva and immediately sign a three-book contract with Chatto & Windus. So it’s instructive to have this opportunity thrust upon me, and to look at Austen growing to fit her literary shoes.

As much fun as Lady Susan is (and you can find this out for yourself if you go to see the forthcoming film version), the first thing to say is that it is not Pride and Prejudice. If the material in The Beautifull Cassandra was irreverent, the word that comes to mind for the novella is ‘silly’.

At present my Thoughts are fluctuating between various schemes. I have many things to compass: I must punish Frederica, & pretty severely too, for her application to Reginald; I must punish him for receiving it so favourably, & for the rest of his conduct. I must torment my Sister-in-law for the insolent triumph of her Look & Manner since Sir James has been dismissed; for in reconciling Reginald to me, I was not able to save that ill-fated young Man; — & I must make myself amends for the humiliation to which I have stooped within these few days.

I don’t mean silly in the sense of being farcical, but watching Lady Susan at work you quickly realise it’s a story about caricatures. The antiheroine, recently widowed, tries to snare herself a rich young husband and refuses to allow anything as inconvenient as a scruple to get in the way. As a result, the story comes to be about her villainous villainies, rather than the detailed character observance that Austen is famous for.

Obviously, Austen cracked this question pretty soon afterwards. I find myself wondering what her thought process might have been. Given that her start was so clearly in comedy, I wonder when she first thought about telling a straight story with witty characters. Because if she hadn’t done that, but had stuck with honing her previous style, her work would have spent the past two hundred years languishing in the well of lost plots.

So I take from this a lesson of my own. Writing is nothing unless you are trying something different…