Books like Lady Susan

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.O Lady Susan Vernon, what a juicy jewel of a villainous character you are, a black diamond, repelling and fascinating at the same time, your wicked charm inspiring possibly an uncanny form of envy more than simple revulsion. Deceiving everyone with your angelic face and pleasingly mild manners of hypocrite virtue, your honeyed smile covers up a cold-hearted, calculating, selfish nature – and how cunningly sophisticated and feisty you are in comparison with those limp noodles of ‘contemptibly weak’ men who are so unlucky and naïve to get entangled in your scheming, just playthings and pawns in your frivolous and cruel games. Speaking your mind, confiding your real thoughts, motives and stratagems in the letters to your equally evil friend Mrs. Johnson, you drop the mask of amiable countenance, showing the hideous face of the ruthless, manipulative and coquettish seductress more ordinary women furtively fear or believe to be hidden behind an all too pretty face, an overkill of charm and overly refined manners – a treacherous face they’d be happy to expose, as your sister-in-law relentlessly expounds in her letters to her mother.However it might appear slightly preposterous in our present day context, and aside from your exasperating and vicious character, Janus-faced, unadulterated malignancy, lies, indulgence in power and dominance, abhorrent mistreatment of your poor daughter Frederica, your rather disgracefully merry recent widowhood (grief-stricken? not you) - isn’t your behaviour simply rational and comprehensible in the world of Jane Austen, an attempt to basically have a normal household again, regain status, avoid and overcome penury and ill reputation – after all, for women in your position, a sensible way of dealing with the ordeals of widowhood if not amongst the lucky ones to whom it brought wealth or even power? A la guerre comme à la guerre! What was to be expected for you as such a widow in the male-dominated society in that time and class? What was to be done? Did you truly have other alternatives than go on the hunt for a rich second spouse and foisting yourself upon the household of your late husband’s brother as an operating base to improve your circumstances, left behind with no home, no money, and nothing useful to do? I am tired of submitting my will to the caprices of others; of resigning my own judgment in deference to those to whom I owe no duty, and for whom I feel no respect.In such a patriarchal world there is no convenient place for an unattached woman, regardless of her eventual valiant intelligence and shrewd machinations, and specifically not if ‘dangerously endowed with experience and independence’ and potentially unchaste like a widow, a figure to be feared and guarded against, knowing the game all too well. But she doesn’t set the rules of the game. And young Jane Austen – estimated to have written this delicious epistolary novella between 1793-94, not yet twenty years old - didn’t seem keen on endangering or shocking society by letting her amoral widow bask in her redeemed liberty and independence for long. Where there is a disposition to dislike, a motive will never be wanting.