My life in books

Somehow I had never, until now, read Jane Austen’s early - but posthumously published - short epistolary novel Lady Susan. I am very happy to have amended this lack. It’s a wicked and cynical little piece, and it is clearly the unpolished work of an author who has not yet found her strengths or style, but it’s highly entertaining.

The main character - and, unusual for any novel of the time, antagonist - is Lady Susan Vernon, a beautiful and amoral widow of around 35, who is wealthy enough to be comfortable in society, pretty and coquettish enough to seduce men left, right and centre for the sheer amusement of the endeavour, and selfish enough to have hatched a plan to marry her daughter off to a rich but weak young man, so she will be assured of access to money down the line should her own assets begin to run dry.

The plot is rather simple, and the main cast of characters limited. Lady Susan, her confidante and accomplice Alicia Johnson, her brother-in-law Charles Vernon and his wife Catherine (nèe De Courcy), Catherine’s brother Reginald De Courcy, and Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica. Lady Susan, who has recently made a conquest of Mr. Mainwaring, with whose family she has been visiting, and has simultaneously detached the young and wealthy James Martin from her own lover’s daughter with the intention of fostering a marriage between him and her own daughter, finds it expedient to withdraw from the Mainwaring establishment and visit her brother-in-law. While there, she makes another conquest in Reginald De Courcy. Eventually, her schemes to marry Reginald while keeping Mainwaring on the side, and force Frederica to marry James Martin, fall through, but Lady Susan manages to snatch some degree of satisfaction from even the jaws of so significant a defeat.

Letters exchanged between Lady Susan and Alicia give us a clear picture of Lady Susan’s character and intentions, while letters from Catherine Vernon to her mother reveal the plot from an observer’s perspective. Occasional letters written by other characters - primarily Reginald - give additional details as to Lady Susan’s actions and their consequences. The most distinctive voice belongs to Lady Susan herself; her cheerful malignancy is fascinating. The other characters are less distinct - the only other truly individual voice is that of Lady Susan’s confidante Alicia. As Milton discovered, it’s much easier to make evil interesting than to do the same for good.

The novel ends rather abruptly, with a brief epilogue outlining the ultimate fates of the various parties following the collapse of Lady Susan’s plotting. Austen either decided to end it quickly, or never expanded the latter part of her outline into the epistolary format of the main portion of the novel. In either case, there is not evidence that she ever returned to the story to develop it further, but went on to write her first published novel, Pride and Prejudice. Lady Susan remains, just barely completed, but nonetheless fascinating for being an unpolished gem.

Flirting with Pride and Prejudice, Jennifer Crusie (ed.)

Part literary criticism, part fluff, part fanfic, this is a highly multi-disciplinary approach to one of Jane Austen’s well-beloved, and perhaps most well-known of her novels, Pride and Prejudice.

The widely varied pieces collected here range from ruminations on why Austen remains so popular, to considerations of the influence of the Napoleonic wars on Austen’s writing, to examinations of the films based on the novel, to original short fiction inspired by the characters and situations created by Austen in the novel. In short, something for almost everyone who loves Pride and Prejudice. This is nothing less than a celebration of Austen’s work, by people who are devoted to it and want nothing more than to share their own delight with other Austen fans.

A long time ago, cynthia1960 recommended Pamela Aidan's “Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman” trilogy - a retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Elizabeth Bennet's counterpart and eventual partner in life, the enigmatic Darcy. I have finally acquired and read the books, and am most grateful to cynthia1960 for the recommendation.

An Assembly Such as This
Duty and Desire
These Three Remain

Aidan writes in a style that is part pastiche of Austen's own writing and part the conventional style of modern writers of Regency romance - a little more modern than Austen herself, but not so modern as to jar the sensibilities of modern Austenites. She follows the events covered in Pride and Prejudice faithfully, but goes on to show us what is going on in Darcy's life (and to a lesser extent, the lives of his sister Georgiana, his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam, and of course the Bingleys) when Elizabeth isn't watching.

Austen was restricted in her own writing by the limitations placed on the behaviour of respectable women of her time and place. There is much that she could not write about because it was not something that women should know anything about. There was much that she had no direct experience of, particularly the way men talked and behaved among other men in a society in which men and women of her general social class in which men and women spent a great deal of time segregated by gender. Aidan can write what Austen could not write, and she has done so quite well.

Darcy runs a large estate and manages his financial interests, he hunts and fences and hangs out at his clubs. He gambles and talks politics and ventures into social engagements with the "faster set" that no respectable women, the kind that Jane Austen would write about, would ever have social dealings with. And we see him doing all of these things in between his encounters with Elizabeth Bennet.

The first book, An Assembly Such as This, is quite wonderful in all respects. It covers the period between the arrival of the Bingleys, with Darcy, at Netherfield, and ends with their departure after the Netherfield ball. Aidan shows us all of these events from Darcy's point of view, showing us a Darcy who is essentially a good man, but one who is in many ways quite rigid and overly concerned with propriety and social conventions. He is attracted to Elizabeth, but sees his attempts to converse with her as a kind of game, not unlike the fencing we will later see him to be most proficient at. And he is horrified at the thought that his good friend and protege Charles Bingley should lower himself to marry someone so out of his own social and financial orbit as Elizabeth's sister Jane.

Aidan's task in the second book, Duty and Desire, is to fill in the long stretch of time between the Netherfield ball, where Elizabeth and Darcy part on very poor terms, and their next encounter at Rosings. Because Austen gives us nothing of Darcy's life in this time period, other than the knowledge that he spends a small part of it persuading Bingley that Jane Bennet does not love him and that he should not pursue that connection, Aidan is on her own. Her choices made this book seem less appropriate - although still quite interesting - to me, as she decides to have Darcy, resisting his growing desire for Elizabeth, go off in search of a suitable wife to bring home to Pemberly and end up in a melodramatic plotline that blends many of the gothic elements that Austen satirised in Northanger Abbey with the Romantic fascination for Irish and Scottish folklore and weird doings. I found these elements out of place in a work based on Pride and Prejudice, although I acknowledge that they are very much a part of a common literary genre of Austen's time and would have enjoyed the story quite completely in a wholly original Regency setting.

These Three Remain brings us back, for the most part, to Austen's story about Elizabeth and Darcy, covering the meeting at Rosings and the disastrous proposal, the fortuitous encounter at Pemberly, the events that follow upon Lydia's fall from grace, the reconciliation of Bingley and Jane, the intervention of Lady Catherine and the final happy-ever-after ending. Aidan handles the character growth that brings Darcy from a proud and arrogant suitor to a man who know the true worth of people and things with some skill, although the use of the espionage subplot (and be honest now, what reader of Regency romances didn't see Dyfed's reveal coming all the way back in volume one?) seemed, again, un-Austenish.

Bottom line, though - fun to read, and full of good and interesting detail about the politics, social issues, and general habits, gossip, conventions and customs of Austen's time, with some wonderful tidbits tossed in, most particularly a reference to a new novel called Sense and Sensibility, about an impoverished widow and her three daughters, by an unknown author.