Lady Susan - Jane Austen

[troisoiseaux]

Read Lady Susan by Jane Austen, which I guess I'd always assumed was an unfinished novel, but it turns out is actually a completed novella! It also turns out to be a very fun read, as an epistolary novella in the form of letters from different people all complaining about each other. The titular Lady Susan is a sort of genteel Becky Sharp, just an absolute scheming menace out to get hers at the cost of other people's hearts, engagements, and happiness— although Becky, a scrappy outsider trying to scam her way up the social ladder, makes a more sympathetic anti-heroine than Lady Susan, who spends most of the book trying to force her daughter into a marriage against her will.

As a fun little side note, I picked this up because of one of those Tumblr "spin the wheel and vote about your result" polls: Who's your Jane Austen roommate? I got Reginald de Courcy and was like, who?, and so I ended up reading Lady Susan through a lens perhaps unique in the history of people reading this book, namely, "Reginald de Courcy: good roommate?" My conclusion is that, if considering the question based entirely on personality and not on logistical considerations of, e.g., introducing a wealthy Regency man to the concept of a chore wheel, he's rather annoyingly spineless and easily led but I could probably live with him. Definitely not the worst option, at any rate— the person whose reblog brought the game to my attention had gotten Lady Catherine de Bourgh!

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

I read a public domain e-book version, which - on double-checking just now - does have occasional paragraph breaks, but so few of them that they weren't really noticeable in an e-reader format! At least it's a quick read.

Instinct suggests that the best Austen roommate would be Elizabeth or Jane Bennet, although I'm sure I could find flaws in that plan if I thought about it. (Maybe the inevitability of Lydia crashing on the couch?)

[pameladean]

I burst out laughing at the inevitability of Lydia's crashing out on the couch.

And I think that's going to be a problem with many seemingly reasonable characters. So many have unreasonable families.

P.