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Lady Susan Vernon, a beautiful, clever and entirely unscrupulous widow of thirty-five, the most accomplished flirt in England, has to leave a house where she…
Lady Susan Vernon, a beautiful, clever and entirely unscrupulous widow of thirty-five, the most accomplished flirt in England, has to leave a house where she has caused a scandal and takes refuge with her brother-in-law's family. There she sets out to captivate her sister-in-law's handsome younger brother, Reginald De Courcy, while trying to force her own shy sixteen-year-old daughter, Frederica, into marriage with a rich fool, all told in a series of letters.
Context and significance
Jane Austen wrote this short novel in letters around 1794, when she was about nineteen, but it was published only in 1871, long after her death. Its witty, wicked heroine is unlike any other in her work, and the 2016 film Love & Friendship was based on it. Read Pride and Prejudice and Emma.
About the author
Jane Austen (1775–1817) grew up in a crowded rectory in the Hampshire village of Steventon, the seventh of eight children, writing comic sketches to amuse her family. She never married, lived quietly in Bath and then in a cottage at Chawton, and published her novels anonymously, signed only 'By a Lady'. She died in Winchester at forty-one.
Her six novels, from Pride and Prejudice to Emma and Persuasion, turn the small world of country families, marriages and money into sharp, funny studies of character. Her ironic narration, slipping in and out of her heroines' thoughts, changed the way novels are written.