Lady Susan and Other Works

Author: Austen, Jane, Seager, Nicholas, Carabine, Dr Keith (University of Kent at Canterbury)

Classic fiction (pre c 1945)

Published on 7 May 2013 by Wordsworth Editions Ltd in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Wordsworth Classics' series.

Paperback | 400 pages
126 x 197 x 22 | 256g

With an Introduction, explanatory notes, and annotated bibliography by Nicholas Seager.

This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen's manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Freindship [sic], and The History of England.