So the possibility that people might want to read her rejected and unfinished works can hardly have occupied her mind.

The decision to print these three pieces was taken by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh. It was not taken lightly, for his half-sister Anna tried to dissuade him, but he judged that the public should be allowed to read them, and in the second edition of his Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1871, he included the texts of Lady Susan and The Watsons, and a fairly lengthy account, with full quotations, of Sanditon. The full text of Sanditon, edited from the manuscript by R. W. Chapman, was first published in 1925.

LADY SUSAN

Lady Susan is the earliest and possibly the least satisfactory of the three. The text is taken from an untitled manuscript transcribed in 1805, but the manuscript is a fair copy, with very little correction and revision, and other evidence suggests that the novel was composed at least ten years earlier, probably between 1793–4. (See B. C. Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts, Chapter 3.) This was the period when Jane Austen was about to start working on her first version of Sense and Sensibility, which was called Elinor and Marianne, and which was also, like Lady Susan, written in letter form. She was at this stage about twenty years old.

Clearly, she liked Lady Susan well enough to make a fair copy of it, and not well enough to pursue its publication. Perhaps she was thinking of publication when she copied it, but none of her novels appeared until 1811, and by that point she may well have become dissatisfied with it again.

One could reasonably conjecture that one of her dissatisfactions sprang from the form in which she chose to write it. The epistolary novel had been popular in the eighteenth century, and was very much a living convention when she tried to use it, but it did not really suit her talents – witness the fact that her second draft of Sense and Sensibility was in the third-person narrative mode which she was to use from then on. The letter form is an artificial convention, and she felt its limitations: stylistically, she was a far from conventional writer, and as Virginia Woolf pointed out, she had the courage and the originality to find her own way of expressing herself – her own subject matter, her own plots, her own prose. She admired Richardson greatly, all of whose works are written in letters, and she enjoyed Fanny Burney, but their method does not come naturally to her: she points out in her Conclusion, ‘This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer’, which indicates her sense of unreality in keeping the game up. Many of her earliest works are skits or parodies of forms that seemed to her ridiculous, and the epistolary form is in many ways open to ridicule, especially from an essentially naturalistic writer like herself. Much as she admired Richardson, she must at times have felt amused by some of the devices resorted to in order to keep the letters flowing from correspondent to correspondent: and surely she must have smiled at the point when that indefatigable letter-writer, Clarissa Harlowe, admits that she has just been forced to surrender to her captors ‘a half-pint ink bottle’ which had been seen in her closet. A half pint would have ill sufficed Clarissa – luckily she had more ink and six quill pens secreted, and she writes bravely on, through abduction, rape, sickness and death, and the last volume is enlivened by her posthumous missives from beyond the grave.

It was, of course, a great age of letter writing, and as we see from Sanditon, girls set aside a portion of each day for the task. In the absence of telephones and easy transport, long correspondences flourished. So an action narrated entirely through the Post Office would have been far more plausible then than it would today. But even so, other pens were better suited to the technique than Jane Austen’s. Many eighteenth-century letter writers elevated the letter almost to an art form – one thinks of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from the Orient, and Horace Walpole’s accounts of contemporary London life and manners. Both these writers wrote as much for posterity as for their friends. Fanny Burney was in many ways a better diarist and letter-writer than she was a novelist: her letters are informal, but they are also witty and stylish and packed with information. Even writers who lived quite out of the world produced some letters of enduring quality: those of William Cowper are particularly charming, full of nothing much – how the ladies were sewing by the fire in the evening, how Puss jumped out of the window, how he would fill in a few hundred years if he lived as long as the ancients. Jane Austen nothingnesses, one might say, and we know she greatly admired Cowper and his quietism: but the letters are finished, graceful, a pleasure in themselves, communicating to an outsider. Of Jane Austen’s letters, one cannot say the same. They are essentially private letters, written for the correspondent alone, disappointing if one looks for deeper truths or lasting subtleties. They have, of course, flashes of wit and malice, a few well-known remarks about the art of the novel (working on a small piece of ivory, using three or four families), and a few revealing comments about her own attitudes to herself and her work, but on the whole they are written for the moment, concerned with such ephemeral matters as beef dumplings, partners at balls, sick babies and raspberry bushes. Far from being consciously ‘literary’ letters, or even bravura displays of informality like Fanny Burney’s, they are genuinely informal family documents, incomprehensible without a key to the names of her numerous brothers, sisters-in-law, neighbours, nieces and nephews. She was a prolific but not a great letter writer, and it’s not surprising that she turned away from the epistolary novel.

Another possible source of dissatisfaction with Lady Susan lies in the slightly melodramatic nature of its plot, and the excessive wickedness of its heroine, Lady Susan herself.