Lady Susan: a re-evaluation of Jane Austen's epistolary novel.

Alexander, Christine ; Owen, David

LADY SUSAN IS ONE of the few surviving literary manuscripts of Jane Austen. Written about 1794 (with the addition of a conclusion c. 1805-09), its physical value as an artefact is secure; yet after more than two centuries its literary value remains in question. It is still, without a doubt, the black sheep in the family of Austen's writing. For many of the early Janeites, it was just far too Augustan; for many of the canon makers of a later age, its formal properties were too outmoded for serious consideration. And even today, after theory has rescued the letter-form from oblivion, after Cultural Studies have undermined notions of canonicity, and in the wake of much critical revision, we nevertheless insist on classing the work as "minor": we can laugh along with the high spirits of the adolescent scribbler or stand in awed admiration of the genius that she became, but her epistolary novel of the mid-1790s never quite seems to fit comfortably anywhere. This essay will seek to redress the balance in favour of Lady Susan, first through a discussion of the physical properties of the manuscript, its history and status in Austen's oeuvre, and then through a discussion of her stylistic use of the epistolary form. It is too easy to assume that Austen's decision to revert to the epistolary after the experiment of Catharine was a reversion to a less demanding way of writing ("a cautious retreat" is how A. Walton Litz characterises Lady Susan in relation to Catharine, in his preface to the facsimile edition of Jane Austen's "Lady Susan" [1989]). On the contrary, Austen's care in her fair copy manuscript and the particular use she makes of the letter form in Lady Susan suggest that this often under-appreciated work synthesised the vigor and directness of the juvenilia and heightened the young Austen's understanding of the letter's value as a vital narrative element in her maturing fiction.

Few of Austen's fictional manuscripts survive. Apart from her pieces in the three transcript volumes of juvenilia (Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third, written between 1787 and 1793) and the short play "Sir Charles Grandison" (c. 1793-1800), (1) Lady Susan is the only extant complete work of fiction in manuscript. The drafts of both The Watsons (1803-04) and Sanditon (1817) are unfinished; and all that remains are a fair copy of Plan of a Novel (c. 1815) and two cancelled concluding chapters of Persuasion (1816). Thus, the manuscript of Lady Susan is a literary object to be treasured. But it is also more than this: it is a finished work whose fair copy status demands that it be taken seriously, despite what is seen as an abrupt and hasty ending. Clearly Austen's relatives and subsequent owners of the manuscript valued it, if only as a relic of her early creative life.

The manuscript of Lady Susan remained untitled and unpublished when its author died. A note surviving with the manuscript--"For Lady Knatchbull," almost certainly in Cassandra Austen's hand--indicates that Cassandra gave it to Jane Austen's favorite niece Fanny Knight (Lady Knatchbull). (2) In 1871, Lady Knatchbull allowed James Edward Austen-Leigh to publish it in the appendix to his second edition of A Memoir of Jane Austen, where it received its title for the first time, printed together with "The Mystery" from Volume the First. This was the first publication of any early Austen manuscripts. (3) The text of Lady Susan, however, was printed from an inaccurate copy because the original was missing. Following the death of Lady Knatchbull in 1882, the manuscript was found and inherited by her son Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen, first Baron Brabourne. On the sale of his library in 1893 Lady Susan passed through to a series of auctions. Some time before the manuscript was sold at Sotheby's on 17 December 1898, the pages (numbered 1 to 158) were trimmed, mounted and bound in a Riviere binding of full orange morocco with gilt decoration (Gilson 375). The appearance is of a lavish volume that was clearly treasured by the owner, possibly Lord Brabourne. By 1925, it was owned by the fifth earl of Rosebery who gave R. W. Chapman permission to edit the first accurate text (Clarendon Press, Oxford). On the sale of Lord Rosebery's library in 1933, the manuscript was bought by Walter M. Hill, a bookseller in Chicago. Finally, in 1947, it was purchased from the New York dealer James E Drake by the Pierpont Morgan Library where it remains available for the use of scholars. The Library published a facsimile of the manuscript in 1989, with a preface by A. Walton Litz.

The first edition of Lady Susan in Austen-Leigh's Memoir was reproduced a number of times, including in the "Steventon" (Bentley, 1882), "Winchester" (1905), and "Adelphi" (1923) editions of Jane Austen's Works, and by R. Brimley Johnson (1931), who was able to correct a few of the obvious misprints. R. W. Chapman's edition (1925), however, became the authoritative one, especially after it was included in volume 6 (Minor Works) of The Works of Jane Austen. Since then, there have been several editions by Oxford and Penguin, in which Lady Susan is included usually with The Watsons and Sanditon, and the text is reprinted from the 1969 revision. (A further edition from Cambridge is forthcoming.) The Juvenilia Press edition of Lady Susan, published for the JASNA conference in 2005, is the first single volume edition transcribed from the manuscript since 1925 and reflects the more positive critical opinion this work is beginning to attract in relation to its importance in the Austen canon.

The manuscript reflects the value Austen herself placed on this early work. Like the other early pieces she preserved in volume form, she copied her draft of Lady Susan--in her neatly flowing, expansive longhand--on to seventy-nine quarto leaves (19 x 15.5 cm), ready for family reading or for future reference. Each letter is carefully numbered at its head with the same spacing and format preserved throughout, noting the writer and the recipient (e.g., "Mrs Vernon to Mr De Courcy") and beneath this the place of writing: details that indicate an obvious concern to preserve the niceties of the epistolary form. The lines of handwriting are evenly spaced, with few insertions or corrections. There are only twelve substantive corrections, consisting of deletions with accompanying substitutions; and thirteen insertions that correct minor errors made when transcribing, such as the inadvertent omission of the word "Mind" in the phrase: "has a very superior Mind to what we have ever given her credit for" (Minor Works 284). The slightly different, rounded hand of the corrections indicates that all twenty-five changes were made at the same time and at a later date than the fair copy. Among the twelve substantive corrections are some interesting distinctions of meaning that may also indicate a later date: for example, the substitution of "state" for "posture" in the phrase "the present state of our affairs" (300) suggests a less pretentious young writer; and the substitution of "Sensibilities" for "feelings" (301) indicates Austen's increasing sensitivity to the nuances of these words as she was writing her early version of Sense and Sensibility. The reference to sensibility here is part of Lady Susan's artful vocabulary, as she persuades Reginald that some months' separation are needed to "tranquillize the sisterly fears" of Catherine Vernon "whose Sensibilities are not of a nature to comprehend ours." Her use of "Sensibilities" suggests that she and Reginald are united in their finer emotional understanding, an irony that does not escape the reader; although the word itself no longer carries the burlesque associations it has in the juvenilia--an index of the more restrained tone of Lady Susan. Several other textual alterations also affect the portrayal of Lady Susan ("she is altogether so attractive" rather than "pleasing," a change that tends to distance the writer further from her character, for example [255]), whose characterization is a very skilful achievement by the young Austen.

The transcription took place some time after 1805, since although the fair copy is undated two of the leaves (nos. 44 and 45) carry a watermark of this date; and it is generally assumed, following Mary Lascelles in Jane Austen and Her Art (13-14), that the conclusion was added at this time. Chapman believed that the whole story was written about 1805, because of its sophistication (52). Brian Southam disagrees, arguing that the style, structure, and characterization are similar to that of Catharine, whose technical and stylistic faults Lady Susan was designed to correct (Literary Manuscripts 46). He believes that the "Conclusion" has something of the "stiffness" that we find in Catharine and that "there is nothing in the 'Conclusion' which would argue a date of composition much later than that we assign to the body of the work," which he agrees with the editors of A Family Record was written in the same period as Elinor and Marianne (c. 1795). Family tradition suggests that Lady Susan was "an early production" (Memoir 201), and most critics now concur that "the body of the work" was probably written soon after Catharine, the final piece of juvenilia in Volume the Third, completed about 1793. The "Conclusion" (which we discuss later), is more likely to have been written at the time of transcription, thought to be about 1805.

The year 1805 was that of Mr Austen's death and the necessary reassessment of the family's economic situation; and it has been suggested that Jane Austen may have considered publication as a source of income to ward off the prospect of school teaching (Nokes 278). But her prompt abandonment of The Watsons about this time confirms her reluctance to attempt a novel so soon after her father's death. A few years later, in 1809, however, Austen appears to have been re-evaluating her earlier writing. She returned to Catharine to update a literary reference (replacing Archbishop Secker's 1769 work on catechism with Hannah More's newly published Coelebs in Search of a Wife). At the same time, she made other revisions to her juvenilia, including inserting the date "Augst 19th 1809" in Evelyn. Since this is the period associated with her revival of literary activity, it is possible that the fair copy and even the conclusion of Lady Susan were both made about this date, rather than as early as 1805 (which is simply the watermark on the paper she used); the few later corrections were probably made soon after when she was proofreading her transcription. If this is the case, then Austen would have been working on Lady Susan about the same time as the later juvenilia pieces were revised, suggesting that she associated them in her mind and probably did write Lady Susan at a similar date (c. 1793-95). Sometime between 1805 and 1809, she clearly considered Lady Susan in a comparable light to her later juvenilia: as a manuscript to be preserved for future reference, possibly for ideas and characters, but not for publication.

The dating of the manuscript--composition c. 1774; fair copy and conclusion c. 1809--has had a critical effect on the reception of Lady Susan. Its early position in her writing career has meant that it has taken on all the negative connotations of the word "juvenilia" with which it has been associated. (4) Since "juvenilia" are youthful works, even now unfairly defined as "reflecting psychological or intellectual immaturity, unworthy of an adult" (Webster's), Austen's early works--together with Lady Susan--still have some way to go before even a majority of Austen aficionados recognise their intrinsic merit and agree with Virginia Woolf that they are "astonishing and unchildish," full of seriousness behind the "clever nonsense" (135). The juvenilia were, from the beginning, introduced with embarrassment as mere 'juvenile effusions ... of a slight and flimsy texture" (Memoir 60), seen as unworthy of Austen's public image. Even R. W. Chapman appears to have been uncomfortable about publishing a volume of juvenilia in 1933, countering criticism by admitting in the preface that "It will always be disputed whether such effusions as these ought to be published; and it may be that we have enough already of Jane Austen's early scraps" (Volume the First ix). Although Lady Susan has never been referred to as an "early scrap," it is generally seen as "so inferior in conception and achievement" to The Watsons and all subsequent Austen works (Southam, Literary Manuscripts 47).

Austen herself, like Charlotte Bronte, was aware that her early writings were not appropriate for publication. Her manuscripts show later corrections that delete material considered improper for a young lady to deliver to an adult audience. In the little story Jack and Alice, for example, Austen removed the sentence: "a woman in such a situation is particularly off her guard because her head is not strong enough to support intoxication" (Catharine 251-52). Southam suggests that this deletion indicates Austen was bowdlerizing her story here to read aloud to family and friends ("Manuscript" 234). It also suggests a growing sense of her writing as public performance, since casual references to drunken ladies being at the mercy of predatory males would be inappropriate for a professional woman author. In "Jane Austen, that Disconcerting 'Child,'" Margaret Doody argues convincingly that Austen trained herself to be a different kind of writer to the exuberant parodist we encounter in the juvenilia. She deliberately adapted her writing to an audience other than that of her family and close friends.

Lady Susan contains the same type of morally ambiguous material that would be acceptable in a family circle that shares the same sense of humor but would be too risky to present to a general audience. Critics have noted the bawdy eighteenth-century tone of Lady Susan, one that reflects the delight in hypocrisy that we find, for example, in Shamela, a work the young Austen may well have read. The heroine demonstrates an air of cruelty that is portrayed with relish rather than condemnation; in her letters to Mrs. Alicia Johnson, Lady Susan is open about what she intends to do and the letter form allows us to witness her villainy. In the novels, the reader is left to judge the hypocrisy of villains like Mrs. Norris by their actions--we have no privileged access to their thoughts. Only with Austen's portrayal of Mary Crawford do we approach the same narrative delight in amoral behavior and she is clearly censured for her attitude. There is an obvious change of direction in Austen's handling of such characters that reveals not simply her increasing moral maturity but her awareness of the need to adapt to the expectations of a different audience.

Another obstacle to a more positive critical reception of Lady Susan, in addition to its "pariah" status as a piece of juvenilia, has been the fact of its epistolarity. Not only Ian Wart's seminal work on the novel but also subsequent work on the same subject, such as the influential studies by Michael McKeon or Nancy Armstrong, has given support to the notion that epistolary writings are the "imperfect precursors of nineteenth century works" and "cul-de-sacs of [the] evolutionary model" (Cook 20), in turn shaping views on the novel itself and limiting critical recognition of the importance of epistolary form within the development of the novel.

As a result, it has been conventional to see Austen's artistic development as a conscious move away from earlier limited literary forms such as the burlesque or the novel-in-letters towards the mature, controlled use of direct narrative--and specifically the free indirect style of which we see her as a particular champion--following an unbroken, artistically logical continuum that moves from lesser to greater effectiveness and control. A cursory assessment of Austen's early writing might indeed tend to confirm such a view, as we observe the gradual transformation of the frequently irreverent, almost expressionistic, epistolary pieces of juvenilia such as Amelia Webster into the generally more sustained seriousness of texts such as The Three Sisters, in which, though still epistolary, a far greater degree of narrative transparency and realism is achieved. This process culminates in the non-epistolary Catharine, suggesting that Austen had finally found a literary form with which she could both attempt a more satisfactorily realistic portrait of a character and her world and simultaneously exercise far fuller authorial control.

The problem with this rather tempting picture of progress is that we then come up against Lady Susan, very probably written shortly after Catharine, and so standing on the border between Austen's juvenilia and her later fiction. It is the most compelling, powerful, and artistically mature text of her early production and is almost entirely written as a correspondence novel. To state the issue briefly: why, if she had found the narrative mode of Catharine so artistically persuasive, would Austen then have reverted to the apparently less satisfactory genre of the novel-in-letters? Would it not have been more coherent to forge ahead with another Catharine-type work? And yet it would seem, as the generally accepted speculation on Austen's early writings has it, that not only did she (largely) opt for the letter form in Lady Susan, but that she then also went on and wrote the posited epistolary ur-forms of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, known respectively as Elinor and Marianne and First Impressions.

In Lady Susan, the letter form is maintained for almost the whole novel; it seems improbable that Austen would have made this considerable creative effort whilst at the very same time feeling a sense of impatience at the epistolary's limitations. Such an argument might be admissible if Austen had given up on the form after writing only a small fragment of the work. In fact, however, she kept up the characters' correspondence for forty-one letters, which makes it reasonable to believe that she found the epistolary satisfactory for at least that much of the novel, which is to say, for almost its entirety. It is surely unlikely that any writer would be prepared to give so much time and energy to a form that she had already deemed to be unsuitable to her needs, not to say moribund.

The usual solution to this particular conundrum has been to recognise that, whilst Lady Susan is indeed something of an achievement, Austen was effectively taking a stylistic break, since the novel is written in a regressive genre. Although Southam concedes that, in spite of the novel's restrictive formal properties, its letter-based narrative "had been handled ... effectively" (Literary Manuscripts 46), and although Litz, far more magnanimously, recognises that Austen "uses the epistolary method with a variety and cleverness rarely equalled in the eighteenth century" (Artistic Development 52), they both agree that Lady Susan runs against the current of literary progress. To quote again from Southam, the first critic to undertake a sustained analysis of Austen's early literary development, Austen, having allegedly failed in Catharine to attain the results she expected of direct narrative, "now returns to the less demanding form of the correspondence novel" (Literary Manuscripts 46).

This preoccupation with the regressive nature of Lady Susan appears to have affected much critical opinion both of character and of form. In terms of character, it has been felt that the vitality and forcefulness with which Lady Susan imposes herself, as revealed through her correspondence, outshines all other characters and therefore leads to an artistic imbalance at the heart of the novel. Southam asserts that, once Lady Susan had been created "Austen seems to have lost interest in the other figures ... without any serious regard to probability and distinction in character and action" (Literary Manuscripts 48). This assertion is broadly similar to Litz's view, which finds Susan Vernon to be simply unbelievable, "perhaps as far removed from reality as the Man of Feeling" (Artistic Development 41).

As regards form, a common view has been that Austen had grown dissatisfied with the constraint of developing narrative through letters. Mary Favret, in a lengthy discussion of this novel, makes the point that the third-person narrative interruption "is taken to mark [her] rejection of the epistolary form and her movement toward third-person, impersonal narrative" (139), that is, a movement away from a technically rudimentary and dying form towards a more developed, mature style of writing. Mary Lascelles, an earlier voice, says that the non-epistolary conclusion shows Austen "[having] lost patience with the device of the novel-in-letters" (14), a view of the text largely echoed by Southam, who sees Austen--tiring of the plot and unable to satisfactorily resolve its difficulties--opting for the easy way out by tagging on a non-epistolary denouement (Literary Manuscripts 46). In short, it would appear from this perspective that the form in which Lady Susan was written prevents effective and balanced character development; and critical opinion suggests that these evident constraints were quickly perceived by Austen herself, causing her to give up on the experiment, seen on the whole as a failure.

It is of course true that the literary achievement of Austen's mature writings overcomes the limitations of the epistolary form, principally its exclusion of an omniscient, omnipresent narrator who, as in Austen's case, can establish the necessary ironic perspective on characters and events that facilitates the careful management of plot, the controlled analysis and development of character and, of enormous importance in shaping both the work itself and the likely response of its readers, is the means by which to provide reflection and comment. In spite of this, however, an alternative view of the epistolary, and of its value to Austen's early development, is possible: in the sense that the form of Lady Susan allows the writer full authorial access to her characters' intimate thoughts (an obvious advantage of the epistolary, of course, but one that her earlier use of the genre did not seek to explore), it clearly represents the progression of her writing towards the more finely balanced, complex, and realistic characters of the later fiction, and towards the establishment of a moral framework within which those characters will perform and be judged. Rather than anachronistic, the novel might instead be said to represent a development that, in terms of what Austen will later achieve, actually looks forwards rather than back. As Hugh McKellar has observed: "Novels in letters were assuredly more popular in the eighteenth century than they have been since; but abandonment of an unfashionable form does not automatically entail artistic advance" (208). Put conversely, the use of a form that was already in decline before the close of the eighteenth century does not, per se, preclude stylistic growth.

Certainly, a number of the characters in Lady Susan are little more than cameos; even Frederica would appear to be more of a standard literary type than a dynamic, innovative creation, recalling as she does the "put-upon heroines of Samuel Richardson" (Castle xxvi-xxvii). Yet the basic conflict of forces that we see in the struggle between Lady Susan and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Vernon, highlights the manner in which this novel brings us closer to the moral concerns of her mature work. Much has been written on the character of Lady Susan Vernon herself, very rightly emphasising Austen's ambivalence towards her heroine and her reluctance or refusal to ever unequivocally condemn her wicked ways. But this has too often overshadowed the counterbalancing force of Mrs. Vernon, a force that earlier views of the novel, such as those offered by Southam, apparently fail to recognise. That is, there has been a certain tendency to see the character of Lady Susan as a continuation (more controlled, admittedly, and more fully delineated) of Austen's youthful delight in the anti-social and anarchic, so much on display in the juvenilia, to the detriment of realising that Mrs. Vernon is also a considerable achievement: a credible "other" to her Machiavellian family member and a fighter, in her own way, for the positive, constructive, and socially cohesive values that, by and large, are those that triumph in the novel.

A closer look at the text itself reveals a number of ways in which Austen is delineating, in Mrs. Vernon, a considerable force for Lady Susan to reckon with. Even at the very outset of the story we find Lady Susan, confiding to Alicia Johnson her aversion to Charles Vernon, candidly confessing that she is "afraid of his wife" (246), an indicator that the relationship between these two women is likely to be conflictive and, critically, that Lady Susan clearly views her foe as no mere pushover. More generally, however, we see Mrs Vernon's credibility not implicitly through Lady Susan's eyes but explicitly through her own actions and attitudes, always of a beneficial character. It is she who recognises the essential goodness in Frederica, and the injustice and tyranny she lives under; beyond this, she makes plans to ensure that Lady Susan's daughter is at last able to live a freer, fuller existence. Certainly, these plans are in no small sense motivated by the thought of thereby rescuing her brother, Reginald, initially at least. But both planned rescue attempts serve to highlight the fact that Mrs. Vernon's basic preoccupation is for evil to be thwarted. Her plans for Frederica and Reginald are, as we have suggested, positive, constructive, and socially cohesive, in stark contrast to the negative, destructive and socially non-cohesive schemes of Lady Susan (cynically overriding the marital objections of her own daughter; revelling in the distress and damage she causes by her affair with Mr Manwaring; deliberately exploiting the emotional gullibility of a younger man for her own pleasure as well as for possible material benefit, to list a few of the main charges against her). Mrs. Vernon's strengths, however, are not limited simply to her goodness. For, whilst we recognise that Lady Susan's perceptiveness is indeed acute, this is matched by Mrs. Vernon's own very solid grasp of the nature of her opponent's game from the first moment. Lady Susan may be shaping Reginald into whatever form she so chooses, but her manipulation of his character does not go unnoticed. When Frederica is first brought to Churchill after attempting to run away from school, an action that infuriates Lady Susan, whose reaction is essentially mirrored by Reginald, Mrs. Vernon ironically observes: "Poor Reginald was beyond measure concerned to see his fair friend in such distress, & watched her with so much tender solicitude that I, who occasionally caught her observing his countenance with exultation, was quite out of patience. This pathetic representation lasted the whole evening" (270). Indeed, much of Mrs. Vernon's correspondence with Lady De Courcy, her mother, is of a similar nature, systematically countering what would otherwise be Lady Susan's dominance of the novel, and ensuring the presence and eventual success of an alternative set of values.

Austen's juxtaposing of these two characters in such a determined manner makes it reasonable that we should reassess the moral strength of Mrs. Vernon and see in her the good counterpart to her sister-in-law. Even the number of letters accorded to Mrs. Vernon suggests she is a worthy opponent to Lady Susan. Her eleven letters to her mother observing Lady Susan's behavior are surely meant to balance the eleven self-revealing letters of Lady Susan to Alicia Johnson. Furthermore, events invite us to make this reassessment: it cannot slip our attention, for instance, that whilst Mrs. Vernon strives to avoid worrying her mother and, most especially, her father, with bad news from Churchill--even when the very integrity of the family name is at stake--Lady Susan happily incites Alice to worry poor Mrs. Manwaring into an early grave. Only if we appreciate the two women as broadly equal can we more fully understand Austen's developing sense of moral conflict; Lady Susan, in fact, would seem to be presenting us--through these two opposing forces whose own positions are so clearly and intimately established--with an incipient moral sense of responsibility, a significant step forward from the world of her juvenilia writings. This is the very aspect that characterizes Austen's authorial perspective in the later fiction and, most especially, is the element that defines her greatest characters. Indeed, this particular struggle, between a character almost irresistibly attractive and yet (to us) transparently immoral, on the one hand, and, on the other, a counter-force whose chief attribute is her quiet goodness and persistence in the face of sometimes overwhelming adversity, foreshadows a similar conflict--attenuated by Austen's later technical maturity--between Fanny Price and Mary Crawford. (5)

Another aspect of the novel that requires re-assessment is the notion of Lady Susan's incredibility. Litz has suggested that the character is unbelievable, a throwback to an earlier age and unlike any other figure in Austen's fiction because of her "thoroughgoing hypocrisy," as opposed to mere "duplicity or insincerity" (Artistic Development 41). But is this really the case? Are there no other outstandingly self-assured yet hypocritical characters in Austen's novels, all of them set well after the mid-eighteenth century? Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park is surely one candidate, as--arguably--are Lady Catherine in Pride & Prejudice, General Tilney in Northanger Abbey, Mrs. John Dashwood in Sense & Sensibility, and Mrs. Elton in Emma. Obviously, the specific nature of these later characters is largely shaped by the fact that Austen's well-developed irony in her mature writing assists the reader in gently discerning the hypocrisy on show, whereas the nature of the epistolary (contrasting outer appearance and inner feelings, as Letters 1 and 2 indicate so effectively) lays open such hypocrisy in a way that can easily be seen as larger-than-life. But this should not obscure the somewhat uncomfortable fact that when Lady Susan is on her most outrageous form, she is often also at her most humanly realistic: 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 Thwarted. (293-94)

Pride, jealousy, and the wish for revenge are some of the aspects that her letters reveal; yet such revelation is always made in the context of strictest intimacy. Even Mrs. Vernon is forced to accept that the public face and behavior of Lady Susan are impeccable (as Letter 6 details). To articulate these concerns openly would indeed be unrealistic, even histrionic, as well as revealing an improbably scant regard for socially expected comportment. But to do so privately, and to friends who "enter into all [our] feelings" (280)--even given the vehemence that Lady Susan shows--is surely a none-too-uncommon reality, one with which we are readily able to identify, if not sympathize.

And yet, in light of this, even accepting that Lady Susan is not the failed experiment that some would have it, how are we to account for the infamous conclusion, the non-epistolary closure that seems to undermine the entire use of the epistolary in this novel? Is it not clear that this authorial intervention, required to avoid a potentially endless exchange of views in which no-one can have the final word as there will always be the next post to bring another reply; another perspective; another series of developments, highlights the inability of the form to resolve the issues it had otherwise been so successful in presenting? Can we not simply agree with Litz that this way of solving the difficulty of plot is a "jibe at the epistolary methods" (Artistic Development 41)? Surely, in this later addition to the text we perceive Austen's sense of exasperation, as Lascelles suggested? A moment's further thought, however, will recall to mind a very considerable body of epistolary fiction--Burney, Fielding, Laclos, Montesquieu, Richardson--much of it a direct model for Austen's writing, in which the closure was perfectly competently managed. And a writer capable of creating an epistolary tale with "a variety and cleverness rarely equalled in the eighteenth century," and of sustaining this through forty-one letters, would seem to be in a position to finish the job with no small likelihood of success.

It is therefore reasonable to look elsewhere in explaining Austen's certainly abrupt termination of the novel. One plausible possibility is her realization by the late 1790s, whilst still writing Lady Susan, that the Augustan verve shown in her earlier work and in this novel was no longer an admirable, desired quality when publication was the objective: raffishness was out of favour, and morality--especially as that concerned the moral behavior of young ladies--was steadily gaining ground. As Claudia Johnson has shown, the era of the Napoleonic Wars brings a backlash against cultural experimentation, and particularly against the representation of women in fiction. The courtship novel is returned. It is softened, moralized, made safer. (Doody: Short Fiction 93).

Looking around her at changing literary and political sensibilities, Austen may well have had to make the determinedly hard-nosed business decision, if she ever wished to be published, of shelving what she had so far achieved in Lady Susan--aware that its modification for prevailing tastes would essentially require an entirely new text--and of trying again with a different form of writing. Jan Fergus has persuasively put forward the need to re-assess the myth of Aunt Jane the amateurish writer, placing in its stead a radically different picture of Austen as a professional author with a perfectly clear idea of what was required for the publication of her work, and with the strength of will to fulfil those requirements: "for Austen, being a professional writer was, apart from her family, more important to her than anything else in her life" (13). In such a scenario, the conclusion that she appends to the novel years later, rather than revealing a latent frustration with the epistolary, points instead to her continued interest in and affection for her text, since she returns to it, copies it out in full, and provides its long-postponed ending. The fact that she parodies the epistolary in her conclusion--as she does so often in her earlier juvenilia--does not negate her obvious interest in Lady Susan even as late as 1805-09. In this light, the fact that she never attempted to adapt it or publish it under some modified form would tend to support the view that her abandonment of Lady Susan was not driven by artistic concerns alone but also, and perhaps primarily, by what proved to be a highly tuned sense of business acumen.

However, that came later. When starting out on Lady Susan, it seems reasonable to say that, at this stage in her progress as a writer, Austen must have felt that what the formalists termed the polyphony of the epistolary--allowing a single event to be "voiced" from contrasting perspectives--and its ability to access otherwise opaque thoughts and motivations, far from being an outmoded and inherently inadequate form of writing, was precisely the vehicle that best facilitated the effective representation of the characters and conflicts she presents. In other words, Austen's return to the epistolary after Catharine is not a "cautious retreat" to a "less demanding form" but an ideal literary means by which she was able to develop the growing complexity of her handling of character and to begin her exploration of the conflicts that the defence of moral responsibility brings in its wake. In this sense, it falls to us who come to this work after long acquaintance with the non-epistolary masterpieces of her mature writing to adapt our views of Lady Susan in accordance with the validity of its form to her then-current stage of development, rather than to reject its shortfalls in light of the work that she was later to produce.

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Nancy. A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Austen, Jane. Catharine and Other Writings. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. Oxford: OUP, 1993.

--. Lady Susan. Ed. R. W Chapman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925.

--. Minor Works. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. Rex: B. C. Southam, 1969.

--. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1969.

--. Volume the First. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933.

Austen-Leigh, James-Edward. A Memoir of Jane Austen. 2nd ed. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1871. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926.

Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Arthur. Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, A Family Record. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1913.

Castle, Terry. "Introduction." Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon. By Jane Austen. Ed. John Davie. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1990.

Chapman, R. W. Jane Austen: Facts and Problems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948.

Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn. Epistolary Bodies. Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.

Doody, Margaret Anne. "Jane Austen, that Disconcerting 'Child.'" The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf. Eds. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2005. 101-21.

--. "The Short Fiction." The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 84-99.

Favret, Mary A. Romantic Correspondence. Women, Politics & the Fiction of Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Fergus, Jan. "The Professional Woman Writer." The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 12-31.

Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939.

Leavis, Q. D. "A Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writings." Scrutiny X (1941): 61-90, 114-42; (1942) 272-94; XII (1944) 104-19.

Litz, A. Walton. Jane Austen: a Study of Her Artistic Development. London: Chatto and Windus, 1965.

--. "Preface." Jane Austen's Lady Susan: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. New York & London: Garland, 1989.

McKellar, Hugh. "Lady Susan: Sport or Cinderella?" Jane Austen's Beginnings. Ed. J. David Grey. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. 205-14.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Limb. London: Fourth Estate, 1997.

Southam, Brian C. "Mrs. Leavis and Miss Austen: The 'Critical Theory' Reconsidered." NCF 17.1 (1962): 21-23.

--. Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts. Oxford: OUP, 1964.

--. "The Manuscript of Jane Austen's Volume The First." The Library, 5th Series, 17 (1962): 231-37.

--, ed. Jane Austen's "Sir Charles Grandison." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957. London: Pindico, 2000.

Woolf, Virginia. "Jane Austen." The Common Reader, First Series. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984.

NOTES

(1.) Now generally accepted as the work of Austen, following Southam's Introduction to Jane Austen's "Sir Charles Grandison."

(2.) MS of Lady Susan in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (MA 1226). The dedication note is written on a small scrap of notepaper attached to the MS. Below the dedication are the words "Original ins of Jane Austen's Lady Susan" in an unidentified band, possibly that of Lord Rosebery, one-time owner of the MS, whose hand is similar. We are grateful to Christine Nelson, curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Pierpoint Morgan Library, for assisting us in identifying Cassandra's hand and in eliminating the hands of previous librarians and the previous owner Walter Hill as author of the second note. Subsequent information on the provenance of the MS is derived from David Gilson, A Bibliography of Jane Austen (Oxford 1982), 375.

(3.) The 2nd edition of the Memoir (1871) also included the first publication of The Watsons, the "cancelled'" chapter of Persuasion and extracts from Sanditon.

(4.) For a discussion of attitudes towards the juvenilia of nineteenth-century writers, including Austen, see Christine Alexander, "Defining and representing literary juvenilia," in The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, 70-97.

(5.) Q. D. Leavis was the first to suggest a relationship between Lady Susan and Mansfield Park; indeed, it is crucial to her "A Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writings" that appeared in Scrutiny between 1941-44, in which she argues that Lady Susan is not only the prototype for Mansfield Park but that it is based on events in the Austen family between 1795-97. Extravagant and unconvincing as Leavis's argument is (it was roundly discredited by B. C. Southam in "Mrs. Leavis and Miss Austen: The 'Critical Theory' Reconsidered"), her alignment of Lady Susan with the Crawfords and of Frederica and Mrs. Vernon with Fanny Price also suggests equally opposing moral forces in Lady Susan.

Christine Alexander, Professor of English at the University of New South Wales and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, is general editor of The Juvenilia Press. Recent publications include The Oxford Companion to the Brontes (coauthored 2003) and The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, co-edited with Juliet McMaster (2005). David Owen, translator and Associate Lecturer in English at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), holds an M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Edinburgh and an M.A. in English from the UAB. He is completing a Ph.D. on the epistolary in Austen's early stylistic development.