The plot itself is simple. Lady Susan, a clever, beautiful and ruthless widow, is determined that her young daughter should marry a man whom she detests. She herself is busily engaged in trying to attract the attention of her sister-in-law’s brother, and trying to preserve the attentions of a previous lover. Finally her machinations are exposed, she loses the brother-in-law, who marries her daughter, and is herself obliged to marry the wealthy simpleton she had intended for her daughter. One can see here one of the stock features of the eighteenth-century plot. As in Tom Jones and Clarissa, we have a young girl who is being forced into a marriage she detests; whose guardians are the very ones to betray her. Frederica is not, it is true, locked into her room by her mother, as Sophia was by Squire Western; she is bullied and coerced by more subtle means. But she does, like Sophia, try to run away, though she only gets two streets away from her boarding school in Wigmore Street. She is not abducted and raped like Clarissa, and her threatened suitor, the foolish and insensitive Sir James Martin, is certainly no Lovelace: nevertheless, her plight is painted as desperate. She has been neglected throughout her childhood, has no friends in the world apart from some Clarkes in Staffordshire, and is terrified of her mother. ‘I never saw any creature look so frightened in my life,’ writes her aunt, ‘as Frederica when [Lady Susan] entered the room.’ Lady Susan refers to her as ‘a little devil’, ‘a chit, a child without talent or education’, and her determination to get her married is pitiless. ‘Frederica shall be Sir James’s wife before she quits my house,’ she writes. ‘She may whimper, and the Vernons may storm; I regard them not.’

This is strong stuff. There is plenty of cruelty in Jane Austen’s other works, but most of it is hypocritical in nature rather than overt. And in the other respects too, Lady Susan’s character is more extreme than we expect from Jane Austen. She is, for example, a self-declared and unashamed adulteress, fresh, at the beginning of the novel, from an affair with the host of the family in which she has been staying, an affair which she intends to pursue whenever suitable. It has often been pointed out that Jane Austen wrote at a turning point in the morals of the nation – that half of her belongs to the outspoken, coarse eighteenth century, and half to the prudish and discreet nineteenth century. In content as in form, Lady Susan is an eighteenth-century work. There are adulterers, rakes and illegitimate babies in the later novels, but we do not see them in close-up and the most violent events take place offstage. Here, Jane Austen is showing us the mind of a ‘wicked woman’ in action, from within, an exercise which she was not to attempt again. She was to attempt folly and frivolity and immorality, but never again so directly did she attempt to portray vice. Lady Susan, with her apartment in Upper Seymour Street, her flippant remarks about her friend’s husband, her cruelty to her daughter and her ruthless selfishness, is unique in her work. It has been suggested that Jane Austen drew on the character of the mother of her neighbour Mrs Lloyd, a woman called Mrs Craven, in this portrait, and the story of Mrs Craven is a reminder that the ill-treated daughter was not merely a fictitious device for melodramatic novelists. Mrs Craven, a beauty like Lady Susan, had treated her daughters shockingly, locking them up, beating them and starving them, until they ran away from home in desperation and married. Mrs Lloyd’s daughters were close friends of Jane Austen, and she must often have heard stories about their wicked grandmother.

She knew about adultery from real life, as well. In 1801 we find her writing very coolly to her sister Cassandra from Bath, describing a ball:

I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an adulteress, for tho’ repeatedly assured that another in the party was the She, I fixed upon the right one from the first… Mrs Badcock and two young women were of the same party, except when Mrs Badcock thought herself obliged to leave them to run round the room after her drunken husband. His avoidance, and her pursuit, with the probable intoxication of both, was an amusing scene.

This is more the world of Richardson than the world of Mansfield Park, and Jane Austen’s tone is far from any tone that could possibly have been used by Fanny Price.

Which raises, inevitably, the question of what Jane Austen’s true tone was, and whether she was denying herself in cutting out the freedom, malice and coarseness represented in Lady Susan. For Lady Susan is not wholly a villain, she is also witty, energetic, intelligent and charming, as even her enemies admit. Many readers have seen in her the expression of something which Jane Austen deliberately repressed or criticized in her later work: the spirit represented by Elizabeth Bennet, Mary Crawford and Emma, which has some of the same qualities, however differently it manifests itself in each. Q.