Lady Susan

This is the original and unabridged text of Lady Susan by Jane Austen.

The widowed Lady Susan seeks a new husband for herself and one for her daughter. Lady Susan is a selfish, unscrupulous and scheming woman, highly attractive to men, who tries to trap the best possible husband while maintaining a relationship with a married man.

Lady Susan is a short novel which Austen never submitted for publication. Although the theme, together with the focus on character study and moral issues, is close to Austen's published work (Sense and Sensibility was also originally written in the epistolary form), its outlook is very different, and the heroine has few parallels in 19th-century literature.