Lady Susan

Of their considerable significance on that side something may be said presently, but it will be well to preface it by a word about the works themselves as items of literary history.

Everyone knows that the novelist left an unfinished fragment, since published under the name of The Watsons, and a finished story called Lady Susan in letters, which she had herself apparently decided not to publish.

These preferences are all prejudices, in the sense of matters of unmanageable taste.

But I confess, I think, a strange historical accident that things so comparatively dull as lady susan should have been printed already while things so comparatively lively as love and friendship should never have been printed until now it is at least a curiosity of literature that such curiosities of literature should have been almost accidentally concealed Doubtless it was very rightly felt that we may go much too far in the way of emptying the waste-paper basket of a genius on the head of the public.

and that there is a sense in which the waste-paper basket is as sacred as the grave but without arrogating to myself any more right in the matter than anybody has to his own taste i hope i may be allowed to say that i for one would have willingly left lady susan in the waste-paper basket if i could have pieced together love and friendship for a private scrap-book a thing to laugh over again and again as one laughs over the great burlesque soft peacock or max jane austen left everything she possessed to her sister cassandra including these and other manuscripts and the second volume of them containing these was left by cassandra to her brother admiral sir francis austen He gave it to his daughter Fanny, who left it in turn to her brother Edward, who was the rector of Barfrestone in Kent, and the father of Mrs. Saunders, to whose wise decision we owe the publication of these first fancies of her great-aunt, whom it might be misleading here to call her great-great-aunt.

Everyone will judge for himself.

but I myself think she has added something intrinsically important to literature and to literary history, and that there are cartloads of printed matter, regularly recognised and printed with the works of all great authors, which are far less characteristic and far less significant than these few nursery jests.

Oh, that's why I don't know her.

Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Lady Susan, The Watsons.

Pride and Prejudice is definitely why we know who she is.

Anyway, we are done sounding stupid.

I have been for a long time.

Right before I wrote my first novel, actually, I discovered Lady Susan, which is like her juvenilia.

And it really unlocked something in me, actually.

I think maybe it was because, I mean, she's obviously a genius, but because it is work she wrote when she was a teenager, it's like a bit less polished.

Yeah, I just like to shout out that side of her, which I think perhaps gets lost in the kind of industrialization of her and all the bonnets and florals and whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned Lady Susan because in that younger version of Jane Austen, she's a lot more transgressive than she later becomes.

You can feel that later she has to reign.

So thinking about characters from other Jane Austen classics.

The first one I actually thought about was, [laughs] uh, Lady Susan, uh, Lady Susan Vernon, who is, um, she's a character from Lady Susan, which is one of, uh, the Jane Austen sort of lesser-known, sort of either juvenilia or unfinished books.

And I'm trying to remember.

I think Lady Susan, I...

It, it's a long time since I've read it.

I'm pretty sure it's one of the juvenilia ones.

Uh, but it's a lovely film.

I recommend it.