Jane Austen's Manuscript Works

"I didn’t recommend any of Austen’s full-length novels, because my assumption is that readers can very easily discover those on their own at this point. But if you’ve exhausted her six novels, or decided that you’ve read as much of those as you want to, then Manuscript Works is really one-stop shopping for everything else by Austen that’s interesting. It includes just a smattering of her letters, so if you’re really looking to go into those then this isn’t the right book for you. (There you’ll either want Deirdre LeFaye’s Jane Austen’s Letters or the Selected Letters edition from Oxford University Press, edited by Vivien Jones.) But in terms of her other fiction, everything is here in Manuscript Works , from early to late. I love the juvenilia, which is so spirited and snarky, and the later unfinished works are here, too, like Sanditon . But Lady Susan is one that if you’ve haven’t read, you really owe it yourself to do so. There’s a lot there to chew on. The film version of it that Whit Stillman brought out last year is fantastic. He retitled Lady Susan into ‘Love and Friendship’ which is a little confusing, because Austen also wrote a good juvenilia story called Love and Freindship [dated 1790], and the film is not that. It’s an adaptation of Lady Susan . If you’ve seen Kate Beckinsale in Love and Friendship then you’ll definitely want to read Lady Susan , which is what Stillman’s film was riffing on. Lady Susan is definitely alternative Austen. If we imagine Austen’s stories as about young women coming into the world and finding out it’s dangerous and unfair and trying to make their way through various social structures, then Lady Susan turns that on its head. It shows us a woman who is herself of the world, who is herself dangerous. She’s a widow who is very ambitious for herself and her daughter, and very canny. After her husband dies, Lady Susan has more social status than money, but she’s starting to jeopardize her stature by getting a reputation for sexual involvement with men. So, she is a kind of a ‘Merry Widow’ figure, as we understand that type from literature. But because the story is told in letters, you’re put into her mind, and you’re put into her psychology in a way that invites you to see it from her perspective, to sympathize with what a once-rich widow would have faced in a culture that really didn’t offer her a lot of opportunities to be powerful, other than using her sexuality. Absolutely. The phrase ‘alternative’ really works well for this body of writings. Lady Susan , understood as a later effort rather than juvenilia, is deliciously nasty. But there are all these precursor texts that Austen wrote in her teens – which is just amazing – that play with literary conventions but also with social conventions about propriety and politeness. This is a question that has been answered in a lot of ways. My feeling is that she started to write with a different kind of public in mind. I really think it’s an authorship and a genre question. But there are certainly critics who approach this question and decide that Austen’s true beliefs were evident in her earlier more playful, anarchic, impolite texts. By this version of things, either she felt she had to tone down her writing in later life, hiding her true beliefs, or she was forced to do so. There are critical versions of that trajectory that see it as a sad comedown from an exciting beginning. Or they see it as proof of her growing more conservative as she aged. I don’t think these are the only interpretative options. I don’t think we have to see this in terms of psychology; I think we can see it in terms of audience. If you were planning to write a comic novel and not just to make fun of comic novels published before yours — that kind of mockery is what I think some of the juvenilia does — then you’d actually immerse yourself in the genre. You’d do that in order to find a way to do it differently, and better. Of course you’d end your comedies with marriages. That’s what the genre does. So, I don’t overly invest meaning in her moving from writing anarchic play-fiction to plot-driven and character-driven fiction with happy endings. I don’t think either early or late writings offer us a more “authentic” Jane Austen ."