Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

"Lady Susan" is an epistolary novel whose eponymous anti-heroine, unlike the women featured in Austen's other works, is bad to the bone. When the book opens, Lady Susan, a stunningly beautiful widow in her upper thirties, has just been sent packing from the home of a family she had spent some months with, having been discovered carrying on a flagrant affair with the husband of the family, right under his wife's nose. She takes refuge with her kind-hearted brother and his sensible wife, who sees through Lady Susan from the day she enters the house and can't wait to see her leave. Also in the home are Lady Susan's teenage daughter, who has been expelled from boarding school after attempting to run away so that she won't be forced into marrying the rich, fatuous nobleman her mother has picked out for her; and the younger brother of Lady Susan's sister-in-law, who has heard intimations about Lady Susan's unsavory reputation; in retaliation for his initial disdain, Lady Susan sets out to captivate him and succeeds so well that she has him on the brink of proposing marriage to her, despite the fact that he is 12 years younger than she is, much to the alarm of his family. It looks as though he is about to fall into her clutches, when a chance meeting between him and the wife of Lady Susan's lover blows all Lady Susan's machinations, as well as her reputation, to smithereens. Lady Susan, to save what is left of her honor, ends up marrying the rich, fatuous nobleman she intended for her daughter; Jane Austen slyly hints that Lady Susan and her married lover will continue their affair under the noses of both their spouses. The book's ending is in a narrative style that appears simply tacked on, as if Austen got tired of both the story and the epistolary style she wrote it in; but on the whole, it's an enjoyable read, interesting mostly because it is so different in style and content from the books we're familiar with.

"The Watsons" is a delight from beginning to middle; I can't say "end" because, unfortunately, Austen never finished it. It's very much in the style of her six major works. Emma Watson is the youngest child of a large family and has been raised by her rich aunt since early childhood; she is thrown back on her impoverished family when her aunt makes an ill-advised second marriage. She is thus reintroduced at the age of 19 to her terminally ill father, two brothers and three unmarried sisters. Emma is a refreshingly original heroine very much in the style of Elizabeth Bennet; she's bright, astute, spirited, perceptive, down to earth, and unimpressed with mere good looks and money. She has no problem rejecting the town casanova who thinks he's all that and a bag of chips; nor is she especially impressed by the young lord of the manor who is infatuated with her. A footnote to the story says that Jane Austen told her sister how the book was to end; we could have guessed it even without the footnote, but it's a great story and would surely have been included in her major works if only she had lived to complete it.

"Sanditon" is probably the best known of Austen's unpublished works; it's also a fragment of a novel, very different in content from her finished works. Austen excels in writing about manners and morals; "Sanditon" is more about social commentary, and somehow, it doesn't work as well. The characters in "Sanditon" are not as interesting or compelling as the people in her other works; they are not nearly as well drawn; they're more like sketches or caricatures than three-dimensional persons. It's difficult to tell how she would have ended the book, and there's not really enough interest to the plot to make us want to know. "Sanditon" is the weakest of the three stories in this volume, but "The Watsons" and "Lady Susan" more than make up for its defects. One can see in these two works the development of a great writer.

Jane Austen plays the game of deception with us too. In this novella, which is almost entirely in epistolary form, we form the impression from reading Lady Susan's first letter, that she is a grieving widow, devoted to the care and education of her 16 year old daughter, and willing at last to accede to her brother-in-law's pressing invitation to stay with him and his family. Wrong! We too have been duped, as we soon discover.

Jane Austen first drafted several of her novels in epistolary form, that is to say, in the form of letters exchanged by her characters. This one, which may have been the earliest of all her surviving works, alone remained in this form. And great fun it is, although Lady Susan's contriving and heartlessness, especially in regard to her daughter, sometimes goes beyond the comic to the cruel.

Naxos has added to the fun that this "entertainment" can provide by issuing the novella in audio book form. Seven actors are allocated the parts of the seven letter writers. Furthermore, there is no abridgement of the text, and there are some snatches of music that serve to provide breaks between the letters and indicate the passing of time. Altogether, an ideal production.