Audiobook · read by volunteers
Lady Susan
Jane Austen (1775–1817)
Read by Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), rachelellen, Robert Scott, Patrick Beverley, Gesine, Kirsten Ferreri, Simon Taylor, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Justin S Barrett · 6 chapters · 2 h 27
About the book
Lady Susan Vernon is beautiful, charming, recently widowed, and entirely without scruple. Staying with her late husband's family, she sets about enjoying the attentions of more than one admirer, while arranging a suitable marriage for herself and a more reluctant one for her young daughter. Everything is told through letters: Susan's own, full of calculated sweetness, and those of the relations who watch her, suspect her and are not quite able to resist her. Jane Austen, famous for her warm heroines, here gives us a sparkling and cold-eyed portrait of a woman who manipulates everyone she meets. It is short, quick and wickedly funny. In six parts and about two and a half hours, it offers a different and sharper Austen than the one many readers expect.
Introduction
Jane Austen lived from 1775 to 1817. Her six major novels, among them Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion, have made her one of the best loved writers in English. Lady Susan is a much earlier and quite different work. She is thought to have written it around 1795, when she was about twenty, and she never published it. It appeared in print only in 1871, long after her death, edited by a family member. The letters pass between a small circle of correspondents, among them Lady Susan, her sister-in-law Mrs Vernon and her confidante Mrs Johnson, and the story is assembled from their conflicting accounts of the same events.
The story is written as an epistolary novel, that is, as a series of letters. This format allows Austen to display her mastery of voice. What the characters write is shaped by what they want the recipient to think, and the reader is left to see the gap between what is said and what is meant. The heroine is unusual in Austen's work: she is selfish and calculating, and the book has a freedom and a sharpness that some readers find refreshing.
The recording was made by LibriVox volunteers. It is divided into six sections covering the letters in order, and it takes about two and a half hours.
Why listen now? Because the novel shows a young writer experimenting with form and character. It is also very entertaining, a comedy of manners with a villain who is hard to dislike, and it makes a good companion to the better known novels.
Public domain
Jane Austen died in 1817: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text