Questions regarding Lady Susan come up constantly on social media. 'Is it worth reading?' 'Why isn't it the same as Jane's other novels?' 'The heroine is very different kind of person as Jane's other heroines' etc. etc. What we have to remember is that Jane never put this novel forward for publication when she became successful. She wrote this as a teenager and had not yet quite found her feet as an author so she copied a style she herself admired, i.e. writing a story in letter form. That doesn't mean it isn't any good. It's actually quite astonishing to realise that a young girl could have such insight into adult behaviour and relationships. The character of Lady Susan can only be described nowadays as “a self centred bitch”! whose behaviour is quite shocking and certainly controversial. In contemporary Western times we are not likely to be comfortable with the mother/daughter relationship portrayed here. Lady Susan Comes Alive was written by Gillian Hiscott during Covid shutdown because she felt that a contemporary reader's first impression of Lady Susan as written by Jane might not highlight just how deep and clever it is and that expanding the storyline would give it more clarity. The intense scrutiny of society needed from a teenage girl to produce this is much to be admired. Relevant professional English actors were also contacted to help produce a recording for an audiobook – one reading the main story and each character reading their “letters”. So although there is a complete book which can be purchased from Amazon it is also split into 3 parts mainly for the purpose of reading alongside the audio book which can be accessed on Amazon by searching under Gillian Hiscott or via website gillianhiscott.weebly.comhttps://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131773#msg-131773Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:30:39 +0100 Phorum 5.2.22 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131785#msg-131785 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131785#msg-131785
Why should we regard Lady Susan as a product of the mature Jane Austen?

Because she wrote out a whole fair copy on paper watermarked c.1806. This would have entailed a considerable investment of effort and expensive notepaper. Had she wished to make only minor alterations - delete or add a few letters, edit some others - a cut-and-paste approach would have been more efficient and economical for a novel in epistolary form. She would only undertake a complete re-write if the original manuscript had been so heavily re-written as to be pretty much unintelligible to anyone except the author.

If, at the age of 30, you were re-writing a piece which you had first written at the age of 19, could you resist making substantial changes in line with your more mature understanding? Come on folks, smell the coffee.]]> alibom32378 Tea RoomWed, 03 Dec 2025 23:11:18 +0000 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131778#msg-131778 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131778#msg-131778 alibom32378 Tea RoomSun, 30 Nov 2025 08:36:59 +0000 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131777#msg-131777 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131777#msg-131777
I will take the opportunity to apologise also to Sunnnie - I did not observe that there are three n's. Jane Austen would not have made the same mistake.]]> alibom32378 Tea RoomSun, 30 Nov 2025 08:18:31 +0000 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131776#msg-131776 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131776#msg-131776 alibom32378 Tea RoomSun, 30 Nov 2025 07:44:03 +0000 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131775#msg-131775 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131775#msg-131775
Let's not be polite about it: Lady Susan Vernon is a toxic, middle-aged, vindictive, vengeful, lying, sociopathic bitch. Not your average Jane Austen principal female. She will take sadistic pleasure in crushing the spirit of her own daughter. She feels only contempt, and would love to humiliate, those who have helped her in her times of distress. She is afraid of Cath Vernon, because Cath is the only person who can see her for what she really is. At the end of the story, she succeeds in entrapping a rich fool; nevertheless, she will probably end her days in a sheltered environment, a destitute, psychotic slut.

Does Lady Susan Vernon really believe in her personal universe of "alternative facts"? It's very difficult to tell; sometimes she seems self-aware, but most of the time she seems to be a prisoner of her own web of deceit. This ambiguity, this uncertainty as to Susan Vernon's real state of mind, is not due to Jane Austen's teenage immaturity; on the contrary, it represents a triumph of artistry, as I hope to show in a moment.

Lady Susan is indeed very different to the six narrative novels. In its own way, it is not inferior to any of them. Jane Austen did tend to verbosity a little bit; she had to cut P&P extensively to fit it for publication; there are passages in Emma, and Mansfield Park, which could have been trimmed. But just try it with Lady Susan. There is hardly a letter, and within each letter, hardly a sentence, which could be safely deleted.

In arriving at a proper assessment of Lady Susan, part of the problem lies in the perception that it is the production of a teen-age mind. People assume that such a mind (even if the owner's name IS Jane Austen) could not really produce a masterpiece. But Lady Susan was not the production of a "teen-age" mind. Conceived in c.1794, when Jane Austen was 18 or 19, it was only completed c.1806, when she was at (or approaching) the height of her creative powers. And that changes the game.

Lady Susan is Jane Austen saying to the world: this is me, unplugged. If it makes you uncomfortable, well, f**k you.]]> alibom32378 Tea RoomSun, 30 Nov 2025 07:42:42 +0000 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131773#msg-131773 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?4,131773,131773#msg-131773Lady Susan Comes Alive was written by Gillian Hiscott during Covid shutdown because she felt that a contemporary reader's first impression of Lady Susan as written by Jane might not highlight just how deep and clever it is and that expanding the storyline would give it more clarity. The intense scrutiny of society needed from a teenage girl to produce this is much to be admired.
Relevant professional English actors were also contacted to help produce a recording for an audiobook – one reading the main story and each character reading their “letters”. So although there is a complete book which can be purchased from Amazon it is also split into 3 parts mainly for the purpose of reading alongside the audio book which can be accessed
on Amazon by searching under Gillian Hiscott or via website gillianhiscott.weebly.com]]> sunnniecornwall Tea RoomSat, 29 Nov 2025 21:47:33 +0000