![]() It is the story of Lady Susan, a brilliant. Lady Susan is lightly punished in comparison, and for this reason, Lady Susan occupies a unique position within Austen’s body of work and within eighteenth-century literature more broadly. This high-spirited tale, told through and exchange of letters, is unique in Jane Austens small body of work. For instance, in Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram, a married woman, has an affair with another man, and as punishment, she’s exiled from society. Lady Susan (the novella’s titular character and antagonist) is cunning, actively cruel, and seductive in Austen’s other work, this would have earned her a severe punishment. Lady Susan, on the other hand, is filled with bad behavior that goes unpunished, making it different from the works of Austen’s predecessors and different from her own novels. However, while Richardson is known to be one of Austen’s influences (he helped to make marriage a legitimate literary theme in fiction), Pamela is a “conduct novel,” which rewards virtue and morality. ![]() In this, it’s most similar to novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778)- Evelina, in particular, satirized a hypocritical society, a mission Austen would later adopt. However, Lady Susan is also an epistolary novel, told almost entirely through letters. Later realist authors indebted to Austen include George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. ![]() Jane Austen’s work is often understood as part of the rise of the realist novel, as she grounds her characters in psychological realism. ![]()
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