Another Sneak Peak at the Program for LADY SUSAN

Jane Austen and the Story of Lady Susan

by Michelle Lambeau

Beloved English novelist Jane Austen lived  between 1775 and 1817 in a selection of small country villages within a day’s journey of London. Born into a large family of the gentry, Jane was gifted from an early age with insight into what makes people tick, the talent for comedy that never lags far behind, and an eye for the strategies deployed by families to gain society’s ultimate prize: a brilliant match for its ladies into families of wealth and connections. She had a knack for storytelling, too, and a taste for the limelight, leading her to spend hours scribbling on bits of paper, then read her tales aloud to family and friends of an evening. She was prolific from a young age and, alongside Lady Susan, written when she was about nineteen, her best loved works, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey (her very own spoof of the gothic novels popular in her day), were written by the time she was twenty-three. Twenty-three! Encouraged by the enjoyment her ‘little stories’ gave to an ever-widening circle of admirers, she went on to try her hand at literature of a more sophisticated nature and acquitted herself brilliantly with Emma, Mansfield Park and the darker novel Persuasion, the last one she would ever complete. Even as she labored on the last three, she devoted time in her late twenties and thirties to polishing Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey for publication, and each one was well received by the public upon its release.

A different fate, though, was reserved for Lady Susan. It is a novel of letters, for some reason, her only attempt at the style. In the first flush of my enthusiasm for seeing the work performed on stage, I had imagined a set up with one actor for each letter writer, reading each letter in turn, which was the closest thing I could imagine to the way the very first audiences experienced it (though of course it would have been with the Author herself doing all the parts, and doubtless having prodigious fun in the process). It quickly became apparent that such a production would take about four hours, and I would be hard-pressed to find actors available to perform—or an audience willing to sit through it. So I started over. A number of times, in fact. But I digress. There are vastly more interesting mysteries surrounding the literary destiny of Lady Susan and much sleuthing to be done by some eager forensic scholar: The manuscript was never revisited by the Author. It was never polished and revised for publication. In fact, Jane Austen never even gave it a title (and everyone knows that a book without a title is like a child without a name. ‘Lady Susan’ was assigned it by the publishing house that took it on.) It was only published forty years after her death, by a nephew who had been placed in charge of her estate. And James Edward Austen’s decision was a controversial one: the historical record points to strong family objections but, tantalizingly, fails to spell out what they were. The leading theories are that either Lady Susan’s exploits were too unseemly to find favor in the Author’s decorous social circle, or else that her transgressions too closely described those of an actual family member.  In an age when respectability was essential to the successful connecting of families by marriage, and where the doings of a single member could ruin a good name for generations, such a breach of decorum by a brash adolescent would have been given short shrift indeed.

 Whatever the case may be, authorities in charge of such matters have consigned Lady Susan to the mortifying doom of ‘juvenilia’ and ‘minor works’ where it languishes to this day, to be stumbled upon only by the most ardent of fans who will not be satisfied until they have perused every last scrap of scribble ever scratched out by her hand. And so the ambition of this play goes just a little beyond the revival of a hidden gem: the hope is to see Lady Susan promoted to the same rank as the other great Austen romances. The evidence presented to you this night begins with the clear development and resolution of plot by a teenage writer who is clearly a virtuoso storyteller.  Note in particular that she eschews such sensationalistic contrivances as sudden accidents, fires, lightning strikes, falling off cliffs and the like, to move her story along. Instead, she allows character alone to rule fate, in graceful application of one of literature’s loftiest concepts. Jane Austen continues in this manner throughout her career: you will not find her villains dispatched by acts of nature or divine retribution; rather, she is content to leave them exactly as they were, unchanged and unmoved by anything that might have befallen. The heroes, on the other hand, are put through a wringer, but come out the other end transformed and made better by their struggles... And the entire text is liberally sprinkled with the wit and insight of a young woman who delights in her own intelligence, bringing each tale to its most satisfying conclusion of matrimony while entertaining and edifying her readers all along the way. We see in Lady Susan early glimmerings of the imaginative genius of Jane Austen: a specialist in romance who never married, an authority on the trappings of wealth and position who was raised to do without, a young woman whose fulfillment ultimately lay in creating worlds where the very richest, handsomest, worthiest, and most eligible of men invariably lost their hearts to strong, smart women who were not necessarily the prettiest, but whose virtues of intellect, wit and character would never fade. Now you decide.                                ~ Michelle Lambeau