How I loved Susan! In Alice McVeigh’s deft hands, she jumps of the pages and makes the novel glow in reflected glory.
When Jane Austen was in her late teens, she wrote a novel called LADY SUSAN, about a cold mother and her mistreated daughter. In the original novel, Lady Susan is 35 years old and she possesses a 16-year-old daughter, Frederica. Rather cruelly, she is determined to marry off her shy flower of a daughter to an unscrupulous gentleman several years her senior. But Frederica finds help, and in the end, Lady Susan marries the cad instead.
Roll backwards 19 years, and we have 16-year-old Susan Smithson, a young woman of great gentility and beauty, but no money to speak of. (Does this sound familiar?) But Susan possesses the great gift of reading people, and because the men hold all the cards in early 19th-century England, Susan becomes adept at using her charms and her intelligence to flatter the male ego (and Lady Catherine de Bough) for her own ends.
So what does Susan want? She wants London with all its balls, parties and opportunities for flirtation. But other women take an instant dislike to her and spread gossip. And so poor Susan spends a great deal of time immured in the society of Hunsford in the County of Kent, at the beck and call of Lady Catherine.
Susan may sound cold and manipulative, but that is not true. The genius of her character is that she is kind-hearted and a loyal friend. Some of her ploys are not for herself at all, but for her best friend (and cousin) Alicia Collins.
If you want to curl up by the fire on these chilly winter days, you could do worse than to immerse yourself in this novel.
