Propriety’s Claims on Prudence in Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey

Abstract

Jane Austen’s only vicious heroine is the eponymous heroine of Lady Susan. Lady Susan Vernon is coldhearted, cruel, scheming, and delightfully wicked. She is lively in the spirit of Austen’s juvenilia, and yet this novella cannot quite be classified with the juvenilia, as it is more accomplished, longer, and more serious even in its ironic humor. It has been argued that Austen abandoned the first person epistolary style of Lady Susan because it had brought her too close to identifying with her transgressive heroine.¹ While this may be part of the reason she changed her technique, it is also true that in the limited omniscient narrative voice she found a way to sympathize with her characters while still maintaining the critical distance from them that was necessary to judge them fairly: that ironic distance is what enables her to create the voices of characters such as Lady Susan, and judge them too, yet without the didactic voice of characters such as Mrs. Vernon, who explicitly condemns Lady Susan.

All I wished for, was to breed you up virtuously; I never wanted you to play upon the Harpsichord, or draw better than any one else; but I had hoped to see you respectable and good; to see you able & willing to give an example of Modesty and Virtue to the Young people here abouts.

—Jane Austen, “Catharine,” Volume the Third (MW 232)