I got Lady Susan at the mall months ago but never got the chance to read this thin book before. I picked it up on a very hot summer day and it only took me four sits of 20 minutes each to read it all.
Lady Susan is a young widower of 35 (my, she's almost my age and already with a teenage girl she's trying to get married to some gentleman).
She's the master at seduction and she seems to fancy any young and handsome man she meets. And men all fall for her.
Married men seem to be her favourite choice and she hunts on human prey all along the book.
Her daughter Frederica is instead the typical Austen heroine, shy, romantic, with good qualities that make a young lady worth marrying. And she's mostly hated and despised by her mother because of that.
All the story is told in the form of letters: a deep correspondence deploys through the 125 pages that make the book: Lady Susan to her lovers , Lady Susan to her best friend, Mrs Vernon (Lady Susan's sister in law) to her mother... The epistolary prose makes the story even the more enjoyable to the reader (especially if the reader is a snailmailer herself).
I think I must rate this one 3 stars only, though. In spite of it being an easy and fast reading, I feel the characters are not round characters.
We miss too many aspects of Lady Susan's life and of the rest of people we meet through the pages.
I finished reading the book and still missed useful elements to picture each one of said characters.
If only Jane had drawn each one of them better, I am sure I would have hated Lady Susan and would have felt for young Frederica by the end of the story. Instead, I closed the book and missed none of them.
Still, it's Austen we are talking about and she can earn no less than 3 stars for any work written by her pen!
