In the Library
Lady Susan
Jane Austen, 1871
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 42
- Length
- Length 23k words
£1.99
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There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person predetermined to dislike acknowledge one's superiority.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Laclos does the same thing with letters, but his two predators hunt as a pair, and the cruelty they trade for sport turns fatal.
£1.99
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp works the same charm on the same drawing rooms, but Thackeray gives her a whole novel to climb, a war to survive, and a fortune to lose.
£1.99
About the book
"She is a stupid girl, and has nothing to recommend her." A mother writes that of her sixteen-year-old, to the one friend she tells the truth to. To the brother-in-law whose house she means to occupy, she is all wounded maternal feeling, lamenting the education her girl was denied. Lady Susan Vernon is four months a widow, lovely enough at thirty-five to pass for twenty-five, fleeing a house where she has charmed her host and taken another woman's suitor. The book is nothing but letters, which is the joke and the engine both: the performance and the plan arrive on facing pages, and the plan is to make her daughter so uncomfortable that the girl accepts a rich fool. There is exquisite pleasure, Lady Susan explains, in subduing an insolent spirit. This is Austen with the manners left on and the morality taken out, written young and never published in her lifetime. Every other heroine here is being steered toward a husband. This one hunts, and the shock is how gladly you take her side.